Comment by Todd on "Which laptop do you use to work?"

YESSS!!! Favorite subject! Haha.

I love my MSi GP72 6QF 17" laptop. It's got an Intel Core i7, it's actually built really well with solid materials (rare now adays it seems aside from Mac), it has 16GB of RAM upgradeable to 32, and it has an nVidia GTX960M. I also have a 256GB SSD in it and added another 1TB SSD as well.

The best part about it is it is extremely lightweight, nice looking, ergonomic, and powerful. It's very difficult to find a laptop which meets all of these. On top of that, I love the screen real estate and I love that it's an "anti-glare" screen rather than a glossy screen. Even more, it has an upgraded cooling system where when I'm working the processor (I do this all the time for my job since I analyze software and am constantly running giant jobs scanning for strings, encryption, etc...), I hit the button and it fires up a couple extra fans and runs them at high speed. It also has 6 added heat pipes. Despite all of that, this thing is only like maybe 2lbs/1kg or less basically. When I got this guy, I got it for only $1,000. An equivalent Mac at the time would have costed $2,500 LOL. I was like, yeah the trackpad on a Mac is better... But not $1,500 better.

I never understood the argument that a 17" laptop is "not portable." As far as I'm concerned, any laptop is portable. But maybe that's because I go to the gym and I used to work a job where I had to carry _real weight! _When I was in college, I carried one this big and about 3x as heavy on my back all day!

Technically, I use Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu on a regular basis. However, my main OS is 10 and the rest I run from within that.

I'd like to change this by making Linux the actual main OS and then running Windows all in VMs, but I'm not there yet and frankly, I will probably just get a separate laptop for that in the future due to driver and compatability issues with some software that I use. But for now, I get to use Ubuntu in a VM too. The reason I want to switch to Linux for my main is because I do not like the corporate spying that MS and other similar companies are doing with their software, in addition to having full control, powerful C integration/tooling, etc... I must say though that I've got a pretty damn nice MS setup though... I've essentially found a way to do everything any Linux guy does in Windows, because I had to. For example, when I browse the web I sandbox my browser which isolates it from anything in the rare case I even hit a bad script. I also use my VMs for anything questionable in addition to weekly backups.

Also been looking at switching to Qubes OS. Check it out if you have not heard of it.

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