Can you be an effective engineer with just one laptop?

I have always used a laptop and a desktop. Allows me to VNC or do a few things at once. Plus allows me someplace to put monitoring or trial software and not worry about not being able to take my laptop home and stuff. Don't know why you would need 2 laptops though? Unless you want one for work, and one for home/travel/etc...which IMO is a waste...

Ok, I'm not insane yet. All we're asking for is one desktop and one laptop for exactly the reasons you state. But apparently I'm full of BS and "why do you need that when no one else does and what do you guys really do over there anyway?", etc. I'm hoping some response from here will help fuel my argument. jk

You could probably get away with one shared linux/windows box or whatever that allows multiple client VNC at the same time. That way you can run what you need from local but avoid spending money for each engineer you have (if you have more than one :-) ). The bottom line is a lot of times I need to run nightly bandwidth/utilization reports, and I can't do this if my laptop needs to go home with me. Additionally, and not the case with me since I work for a very large financial institution, but if you don't have money for sniffers and rely on ethereal on your laptop, you are out of pocket on email or whatever while your laptop is tied up with console connections, lab work, or sniffing.

I don't think you necessarily will have a fool-proof argument, but you should have some kind of ground to argue on. Worst case, buy a refurb pentium 4 with a gig of ram, should do you fine. My laptop is where I need the computing power, the desktop is for crash and burn trial/ monitoring apps, a place to VNC into and run some stuff from, etc. Just try to come to some solid ground between your basic requirements and cost analysis. No reason why you can't spend a few hundred bucks and meet them half way.

I architect solutions at my company. I use a dual monitor linux box running vmware for multiple windows VM,s. once VM for office work, one for network administration and other tools and one for testing and I have a standalone desktop running windows as a backup and other PC can run tasks on that take a while and leave it running. I also have another older desk top running linux for testing, running dedicated tools for on the spot troubleshooting. I have a linux laptop that has a vm windows as the one I have with me when not in the office and another laptop dedicated for just testing, packet captures, auditing.

I only work as well as the resources available and do not mind not working at all when they are not available (Mostly depends on managers attitudes). Last time I only had one machine and it broke, I got to BS around the water cooler for an entire day without having to do anything, the idea of only having one machine per person for the top engineers did not last long after that.

Greetings,

To put it simply... Yes.

I work in a Global Corporate and for over 25 years have supported Networking environments from IBM SNA down to 100bps Async channels, and have only ever had 1 PERSONAL machine (the last 12 years its been a laptop). However I have always had corporate SHARED Resources (Servers) also available to me. I guess it comes down to what type of environment that you need to operate in, and in my case there are almost zero parts of our network that are standalone, so where there is an isolated segment, 2 machines can be a great help. If 2 machines are needed in that case then 2 people can attend.........;-)

I can see scenarios where 2 machines may allow for more efficient use of my time, however I guess thats weighed against the cost of support for 2 machines.

I'm with MC: I have one laptop, but it has a virtual machine on it to aid network troubleshooting. For example, inside the VM, I test new dialup or IPSec connections, with default route pointed through the VPN or modem connection. But my productivity environment's routing table doesn't change.