I love it! Same approach I take, but even cheaper! I use a Lenovo T410, which you can readily acquire on Craigslist used/refurbished for ~$250. Comes with an i

I love it! Same approach I take, but even cheaper! I use a Lenovo T410, which you can readily acquire on Craigslist used/refurbished for ~$250. Comes with an i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, and the HD can easily be upgraded. (I threw a cheap SSD in there for local DB issues.) I'd love to use an even older Thinkpad, but since I do some local testing of machine learning / CPU-bound processes, an i5-series processor is probably the floor given the complexity of the models I run. Regardless, I still love a huge PC battlestation at home (incredibly cheap for the power) and a cheap laptop that is no-frills but gets plenty of processing power for 99.9% of applications. Never really caught on to the Mac craze, even when I got free Macbook Pro Retinas from my last employer when they were first out - a sticker price of ~$4,000! Jeez!