audit’s thoughts.

Does anyone really need or use a desktop anymore?

August 4th, 2006 | by audit |

This is something that I wrote up for my pet project.
I’ve been in the IT industry for 20+ years and over the last 10, I can honestly say that I’ve used a laptop more then a desktop, this includes for my own personal usage. If I find myself using a regular keyboard, I feel like my kids can type faster then I can.

With my laptop, I always have access to my files that are PGP encrypted of course, if I have a wifi hotspot in the place that I’m out with my wife and kids or by using PDANet on my Treo then I can jump online if something pops up. And of course my favorite, I have all my tools with me that I need to manage either a *nix or windows network at anytime. I have Virtual PC installed and then 1 copy of Linux installed, Windows Server 2003, XP-Pro and the Security Auditor CD is installed on their own VM’s so it doesn’t matter what OS I need at the time, I have it all with me.

My wife has even figured out that she hates sitting at the desk in the den just to surf the web so she asked me for laptop, and I gave her one of my older ones since all she really does is surf the web, she HATES email and never uses it. Why I’ll never know, but I’m not going to argue with her.

We both really enjoy sitting on the couch, or outside when it starts to get nice and cool out at night and even in bed when we’re sick. Since I have a full wireless network at home all CISCO based thanks to Ebay. Yea I know CISCO’s overkill for a home Access point and there’s a reason I went to that AP. Back a little over 2 years ago when I had just started at a new company and decided to have my boss, her boyfriend, (now husband) and a couple other co-workers over for dinner. I had a linksys wireless AP at the time and within a couple minutes of all of us logging in and doing some file copying, we basically destroyed the linksys AP.

Now I rarely have people over anymore but figured that as my kids get older, they will start doing more and more on their systems and since their computers are connected via wireless because I really didn’t feel like running Cat5 cable to their rooms, I know that the CISCO will handle the added traffic going through it.

I keep daily complete images of my laptop on 2 different systems and a couple DVD’s in case something happens and I need to reimage my laptop, Something I rarely see or hear of people doing. I even have my folks and in-laws doing regular backups on their laptop’s to simple file servers that I’ve setup at their houses. They really don’t need full
image backups when all they really use their computers for is e-mail, surfing the web and using Quicken.

Now back to the original question. My thoughts are, you can get laptop’s now with huge drives, DVD burners, great graphic cards and a couple GB’s of RAM now so what’s the point in having a desktop anymore? I’m finding the only reason I need a desktop anymore is for file server and print server. Within the next couple months, I’m going to tear down my 2 desktops that my wife and I have setup for ourselves and toss the largest drives I can find in them and then turn them into our file server and backup server. I just don’t see a reason for desktop’s anymore.

Thoughts?