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Please excuse me if this question is too vague or broad. If necessary, I'll provide more details as I have them or withdraw the question.

I've been offered a new job as a C#/C++ programmer and the employer has generously offered to let me pick out my own computer. I have some strong ideas on what I want, but it's been a long time since I've picked out a laptop. Usually the employer just picks one and that is that.

I'm hoping someone can recommend a good model.

My non-negotiables:

1.  I want a laptop as I need to be portable.  BUT most of the time I'll be at a desk so I'd like a docking station and two monitors, keyboard, mouse.  

2.  I'm sold on solid state drives.  I definitely need one or it needs to be the major drive.

Some other factors

1.  I'll be doing mostly C# programming (running Visual Studio). BUT I'll occasionally be doing some firmware programming (AVR) or debugging.
2.  Must be able to run Windows 10.

At my current job, I have a Lenovo W530. The specs are:

Windows 7 64 bit Intel Core I7-3740 QM CPU @2.76GHz 16 GB Ram Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GBytes NVidia Quadr K100M Graphics AND Intel HD Graphics 4000 Also, a docking station which is at work right now.

This works pretty well and perhaps it's the way to go? Although it's 3+ years old so I'm sure there's better stuff out there. My only complaints have been I've run out of disk space, and I've occasionally had problems on running out of memory (we have some memory hog programs). Other than that, it's been pretty solid.

Any recommendations for a good laptop and docking station?

I'm sure there are questions such as 1) What kinds of graphics programs will it need to support or (2) exactly what kind of equipment will you be interfacing with. I don't have the answers to those questions yet...

Thanks,

Dave

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I can definitely say that a Lenovo is a great laptop for work from my own personal experience. I had a Lenovo and thoroughly enjoyed it. Because businesses tend to buy new laptops only so often I would get a rather powerful one to start. The one I recommend is this: Lenovo p70. This laptop is very nice for productivity. Although it feels weird spending a lot on a laptop for your job, don't feel bad. Your work understands that you require a nice laptop to be productive. And definitely customize it to your needs if you can. It can dock on a laptop dock (sold separately of course). But you can also add a SSD. The dock can also be bought from Lenovo so everything is integrated perfectly. Hope this helps!

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  • Thanks. I'll start checking those models out. Did you get the Xeon? That adds to the price considerably. I notice that even the base model, Intel Core i7-6700HQ Processor , is more powerful than my current Lenovo. In my own experience, RAM and SDD disk drives give me the most bang for the buck.
    – Dave
    Sep 20 '16 at 21:36
  • @Dave No, but I only needed it for straight forward coding applications with little need for heavy multi-core processing.
    – El Bromista
    Sep 20 '16 at 21:41

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