enraged768 t1_jbqjste wrote on March 10, 2023 at 11:01 PM

Reply to comment by myonlinepersonality in Dell’s Latitude 7330 convinced me that business laptops are too expensive by dapperlemon

I have one and use them to spin up different VMs out in the field to work on different industrial automation devices. We get the rugged ones though they come with a handle dual batteries so I can actually work all day without charging it and it has a handle and a built in rs232 port.

oldtimeplane t1_jbqq7r6 wrote on March 10, 2023 at 11:48 PM

My company is about to start delivering our automation products to the field. Spinning up VMs to work on equipment sounds much more modern than the old technician with a clunky laptop approach. Can you describe the benefits you get from this approach and maybe a bit about your workflow? I'm really curious about how you would operate.

enraged768 t1_jbqvf7f wrote on March 11, 2023 at 12:27 AM

Well when you have 5 vendors that sell five different product line that require varying levels of licencing you need vms to keep everything separate. For instance there's extremely old Allan Bradley equipment out there 30, 20, 15 years old you need vms to store those softwares on them so you can communicate with old equipment. You need it to keep customers separate and you need it so you can just stop the virtual machine if there's any issues within the environment you've created. But....it's still just on a laptop for the field stuff. It's just an extremely expensive laptop. When I'm sitting in my shop we have a virtual environment that I can log into and do what I need to. We still have clunky laptops you're honestly not going to come sweeping in and replace that aspect in the near future there's to much old shit out there still. I mean hell I just worked on a GE 90-30 that's still in service this week. That's....older than most people on Reddit.

Visible-Disaster t1_jbrccht wrote on March 11, 2023 at 2:43 AM

But how do you make your PCMK card work without a PCMCIA slot? DH+ at 57.6kb is all you need! /s

Pre VMware I had multiple hard drives for different era controllers. Was really fun in the bad old days of when you could only have one Logix 5000 version installed at a time.