Vanity: Suggestions for a high-performance business laptop?

I am about to embark on a career as an Independent Contractor -- I am a computer consultant (37 years) in the ERP space.

I have some pretty good laptops now but I really think I need a high-powered, high-performance Wintel laptop. I would like to keep it at 15" to take with me, although I have a Surface (which I like but has idiosyncrasies) I use for mobility.

This is business, not gaming (which I eschew), so I don't think Alienware and its derivatives are what I am looking for.

I am a Dell or Lenovo guy. I’ve had so many laptops for work over the years and also at home I really couldn’t recommend any others for windows. Dell has some really nice 15.6 widescreens these days that have almost as much real estate as my old dell dual core 17” at about half the weight.

My personal laptop is an Ideapad Flex 14”. I just purchased a Flex 4 14” for my son with an i7 6th gen and a 256gb ssd for about $630. If I was going to go high end I would look at a YOGA with the 6th Gen i7 and a 500 gb a video card and as much ram as I could get. probably about $1400 if I took a guess. buy from Lenovo direct or the dell outlet. Dell Outlet get a refurb with the same warranty as a new one with a great discount. Usually they have been returned, fully recertified and are in better shape than new.

It isn’t emulation — Macs run on the same Intel processors as Wintel boxes, and run Windows natively with the right drivers (which Apple and VMWare provide). There is a performance hit in using a virtual machine, but that’s because you’re running two operating systems at the same time.

One option not a lot of people have mentioned is Boot Camp, Apple’s software that allows you to partition the hard drive, install Windows, and boot straight into it. VMWare Fusion can use the Boot Camp partition to run a virtual machine, so you can use the same Windows installation both ways — side by side with Mac if you need the convenience, or Windows alone if you need the performance.

I work for an IT contractor, and the advantage of virtual machines for me is that I can have Win7 joined to one client’s active directory, and Win8.1 joined to another client’s, and switch between them seamlessly. I even have a WinXP machine, but I might archive it because I haven’t needed it for a while.

The great thing about virtual machines for a developer is that you can quickly switch between VMs for testing.

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