Thinkstuff

I spent most of today at the University of Iowa, attending a seminar put on by Erb's, Microsoft, and IBM. Most of the network security information that was presented wasn't new to me, but I found the sales pitch from the IBM rep to be interesting. I haven't paid attention to the desktop market much since I moved into networking, but when it comes time to buy my next laptop, I'll be looking long and hard at their ThinkPad series. The pre-boot environments they've built to allow easy recovery and backups of the disk image are very cool, even allowing internet access without a working OS! If I had to manage a fleet of laptops, I think it's what I'd pick. They also have nifty little finterprint readers and built in hard drive encryption via a dedicated encryption chip on the motherboard. If security is your thing, look to IBM, Dell doesn't have anything this cool...