At work, we are each assigned a moderately powerful laptop in order to work remotely. I work from home mainly, but occasionally from other states if vacation needs it. In my case, it’s a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 3 GB of RAM. While this isn’t top of the line, it’s certainly enough to create mainframe software via SSH.

For development on other projects, however, I use a 2.7 Ghz i7 Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM. It also has a 240 GB solid state drive, a performance improvement I thought so important that I bought one for my work laptop as well. I’ve used Mac computers for years, and I am used to having a certain performance come from them.

As I said, my work computer is for working remotely, so one would imagine that portability was king. However, despite it’s modest benchmarks, it’s also distinctly non-portable. While it measures only 14”x10.4”x1.3”, it weighs around 6.5 lbs (7.5 with charger). This makes it annoying to pack along with my iPad and other items for vacation. In addition, thanks to its width and thickness, it takes up around 2/3 of the bag I normally carry, which makes it hard to pack a spare change of clothing and travel light.

Recently, I’ve noticed that I’d rather just not take it and hope that no emergencies happen. Given that certain weeks I’m on call, I’m expecting my luck to run out sooner rather than later, and started looking for other options.

I had thought about just installing the disk image to a hard drive and borrowing a computer to boot from, but that involves downloading a virtual machine on someone else’s computer (if one is available), which makes me nervous both for politeness and security’s sake.

My current plan is to buy a MacBook Air and install the Windows 7 environment through VMWare Fusion. This will allow the hard drive encryption to work on the VM, keeping everything secure but not fowling up the OS X environment, as well as make it almost as portable as an iPad. Even the 11-inch MacBook Air is more powerful than my current work computer, and as I said, I don’t need that much performance. What I need is a laptop I’m not annoyed to take places.

Note: I’m not made of money. The above is a bit of a long-term plan, as it will take awhile to save. If you have any suggestions or criticism off current plan, yell at me on Twitter.