I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p for work. I have an IBM Thinkpad X60 (refurb) for my personal computer. Given the corporate policies enforced in today’s business world, there I keep my personal content (blogs, personal email, photographic work, money manager, etc.) off my work computer. However, when I travel, I don’t want to carry two computers but I also don’t want to give up the ability to keep up with the personal commitments that are contained in on my computer.

There are two options - “hosted services” and “dual systems”. If you trust internet services providers - to be safe, keep your records private, safeguard your identity, not lose your data, and be available 24×7 - then using on-line services for your photos, blog editor, email, banking/financials, etc, is a great solution. You don’t even need your own computer for most things - you could use the one in the hotel lobby (sans prying eyes) or a that of a traveling buddy. You only need to remember to flush the browser cache, don’t save any website cookies, and delte any files that might get downloaded.

On the other hand, if you might still a bit of a privacy junkie and still mistrust Internet services providers to always do the right thing for you above and beyond what might be good for them, then you want to keep your data local, do your own backups, and only use the Internet for “send/receive”. (I won’t get into whether� this is more safe or not.)

My current solution is to make my work “computer” a “dual system”. What I mean is my X60 computer can take the disk drive from the T60p and run. This means, I can travel with the X60 plus the small HDD from the T60p and have both “computers” at my disposal - albeit one at a time.

I first configured the T60p for all of my work needs. Next, I popped out the existing HDD from my X60 and popped in the HDD from the T60p. I then started up the X60. It took a few downloads to get all of the correct drivers but after about 15 minutes, I had it running as if this were the correct hardware.

Now, I can run my work “computer” on the T60p or the X60 hardware seamlessly.

Can you do *that* with a Mac ? If not, could you boot from an external USB HDD ? If so, could someone tell me which one(s) work ?

Related tangests ...   Blog Traffic Retrospective   Logo-of-the-Day goes hi-tech   Function over flash

Posted in Apple Inc, Backups, Blogging, Business, Email, Flickr, Gmail, Privacy, Quicken, Thinkpad T60p, Thinkpad X60 | Print

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  Print