In my experience, "Engineers" tend to get butt-hurt when people tell them that their "well-defined" systems/nomenclature have no relevance when applied to the "real world."

True! I was at a public open house for an infrastructure project where the engineers and business leaders described their project, all the engineering safeguards that would be put in place, etc.... and then the audience of 300 basically took the next 90 minutes to blast away at them. The engineers had really nothing to say.

Well, I guess I know what an "engineering laptop" is supposed to be now. I checked with my IT leader and he's never heard of the term: he'd guess that it would be a laptop that would have a large screen and robust graphics processor for CAD.

So since we're all incredibly picky about nomenclature, I'd say that knowing what we're talking about is pretty key to answering the OP's original question. If half of us are sitting around, doodling on our notepads and wondering, what is an "engineering laptop" that kind of affects what we respond with (is it "tough"? do you have to bring it back and forth? can you get away with two separate machines?).

Eh... what can I say... us engineers are supposed to be fussy. It comes in handy when my wife needs me to eyeball a picture or cut brownies within 1 mm of being level or straight.

Do I sense a little chip on the shoulder?

Its just an engineering tool, relax!

It's not the syncing of documents (or source code in my case) that's the problem. It would be trying to maintain the exact same software configuration on multiple machines.

I'm a software developer and I work with a variety of tools including C, java, php, perl, postgres, and starting now - python. That stuff all comes with OS X but the included versions can be out of date, missing some features I need, or just a bad idea to mess with (postgres). So I end up installing my own versions. Further, things like perl and php have tons of available modules that make life easier that I also end up installing or in some cases building from source. I'm adding new modules all the time.

Further complicating things is that fact that I have linux, Windows XP, and Window 7 virtual machines. Their configurations get tweaked now and then too. Now, I have backups of all of it and if it was an emergency I could be up and running on another computer pretty quickly, but it's not the sort of thing I'd want to do just to get an hour or two of work done at home.

to each his own. a 5 GiB image takes less than 15min to transfer and install (i usually move single files of 10-20GiB nightly). in fact, upon leaving work, just tell the machine at home to image the one at work and it's ready when you arrive.

i just don't see the need to carry a machine around.

my gf is like you though, kinda old skool, and i refuse to bike with her machine on my back.

such is life, i guess.

i guess it also helps to identical hardware at home and at work (both even with Swedish keyboard).

I don't think it's really a case of "to each his own" or being old school, I think it's more a case of recognizing that a while particular approach can work well in some situations it may be impractical in others. I have one database that I routinely work with that's about 100 Gig. I don't keep a copy on my machine all the time but now and then I'll spend a week or two with a copy installed locally so I can experiment with approaches to dealing with the performance issues that crop up with that amount of data.

Taking an image of my machine and installing it another would require I shutdown my postgres server first. Otherwise the results will be corrupt databases. It's not hard to do but it would suck if I forgot.

Setting the database issues aside, a single virtual machine can be over 20 Gigabytes. I have multiples. And again, I have customized development tools that would have to replicated. I routinely have over 150 Gigs of stuff on my work machine and I don't keep personal photos, videos, or music on it that are taking up space.

Trust me, just tossing the whole thing in my backpack is the easiest thing to do and why I have a laptop in the first place. I can not only work at home if I need to, I can duck out of the office and head to the library or coffee shop for a couple of hours if I really need some undisturbed time.

I do not trust mine in anything but a pack strapped to my back... I would feel better having it in an aluminum flight case handcuffed to my wrist.

Whatever floats your boat and/or makes you feel important. It's a moot point anyway.

Have you considered VNC or other remote access means?

Running development, testing and project management applications remotely is painfully slow.

There are far more important people than me in our organization that would be quite happy with your solution. In fact, we have several people with company bought machines at home (though not as many as we used to). Anyway, it just wouldn't work that well for me. I am important enough that I don't need to take tech advice from people on commuting forums if I don't want to. Some times the simplest solutions are the best.

Actually, no - I don't have a chip! The funny thing is, I actually could have said the same about you given your repeated efforts to educate the rest of us on an "engineering laptop". Compared to my colleagues, I am pretty relaxed... mind you, that might not be saying much given that we're a bunch of engineering faculty types - LOL...

I figure now I might be able to make some money... I get asked by incoming students what kind of laptop they need, and I just usually refer them to a brand or model that gives them good performance for the money for the next couple of years. Now, I suppose I could sell them my own specially branded - ahem - engineering laptop! Make a bit of commission since faculty salaries aren't rising with the rest of the economy...

Wow... a real cliffhanger... will we or won't we believe there is such a thing as an "engineering laptop"? AND should it be allowed to commute? The suspense is killing me. I hope it is not over!

Well, I hope I didn't offend you, just throwing in a little humor. My repeated attempts to answer a very simple question was never accepted. The OP just wanted to know how he should plan his commute with his "engineering tool" on board. Someone else hyjacked the thread by asking what is this tool? I waited a while but the OP wasn't online so I decided to explain what it was because I was familiar with it and commute with mine too. Then a few others chimed in with an attitude of disbelief. Why did that happen guys? I should have stopped trying right then. The thread was wasted and of no value.

Welcome to bike forums. It took about 1,000 posts before I figured out how things work.

After a thread reaches about 15 posts I think we're doing good if a 1/3 of them manage to be on topic.

I haven't used VNC in quite awhile. We do run terminal services now but that doesn't really help the Mac users much. I thought it was great to be able to control a machine remotely in a pinch but I was never fond of it as a way of working from home (or someplace else).

From an energy use perspective it bugged me that the host had to be kept on and available overnight in case somebody might use it from home. Probably insignificant in the big picture but it bothered me anyway.