Date: 05/18/05 (IT Professionals)    Keywords: programming, software, database, sql, web

Howdy all,

After 6 years in the trenches of application and network support I am calling it quits and returning to academia in social science. That is not to say that my IT days are entirely behind me. My area of research is going to be heavily reliant on Geographical Information systems and database design and analysis...

so I have a few questions for the group

1. (this one is an easy one probably).. I am looking to purchase a laptop in the next few weeks. I am torn between going with a tablet (the toshiba, I have seen far to many problems with some of the others , especially the acer) and a cheaper basic laptop. Essentially I am not all that concerned with performance if I go cheap. The first couple of years it just needs to run word processing, statistical analysis software, GIS software (on a low level) and that sort of thing. If I go cheap I would buy another one when i started the dissertation.. The question is on the reliability of the toshiba tablet.. have any of you used it extensively, or deployed them? I just want to be sure it is gonna hold up if I am gonna spend a nice chunk o change on it.. if the view is negative, whose laptops do you like? No way in hell I am getting a sony, but is there anyone else i should avoid like the plague?

2. For the SQL folks out there. It looks like the department uses MS SQL(I will have to stick with it for awhile because all the GIS programming courses are VB and i really won't have time to learn a real programming language). My question is, when I go to build my own SQL box what sort of spec should i be looking at? My databases will be the platform for my GIS mapping, and will be essentially legal databases with a relatively small amount of data (case name and number, disposition, appellate action, votes on appellate action and brief case summaries) Eventually it will all be set up with a read only web interface for sharing the data. How beefy am I going to need to go. I know MS SQL is a resource beast, so I probably can't get away with having it on a machine that does much else, but I am going to be on a grad student budget, so unless I get some major funding I will need to stay reasonably cheap

Input greatly appreciated!

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/itprofessionals/11926.html