Hardware Update
Last year I bought a Lenovo W510 to use as my mobile(ish) Hyper-V lab. I mentioned the initial problems I’d had with core parking - http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/08/06/lenovo-w510-hyper-v-and-bsod.aspx
Once those were resolved I haven’t had any other problems with it. I never did get Virtual Machine Manager installed – I tripped over a problem that VMM won’t recognise the agent. Other people have reported the same problem (with different hardware and configurations so its not a W510 issue) but there doesn’t seem to be a known fix. I might try again with VMM some day but at the moment I can live without.
All in all very satisfied with the W510 – it does what I required and gives me sufficient performance for experimentation and demos.
Last years other purchase was a HP Mini netbook
http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/07/11/netbook-revisited.aspx
This has been even better. Its my travelling machine of choice. I can work with Office documents, browse Internet, use my e-readers and even write PowerShell scripts. I’ve run a number of presentations off it and it works excellently.
Another winner.
Next purchase is likely to be a tablet of some kind. Maybe this year or maybe wait until next version of Windows and see what comes along then