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Laptop recommendations


Burncycle16

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Hey guys, just recently ordered my mk5 as well as a bunch of other goodies, and now I'm considering getting a laptop since my old Alienware is on it's last days. It's pretty much only gonna be used for pen testing and other related things, so I was wondering if you guys had any recommendations. In your opinions, what would be a good hacker-friendly laptop?

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I think this topic has been discussed many times, so you could try searching for it on the forums :)
But to answer your question, for me a good laptop is having decent battery life. I know people might say you must use a gaming laptop or have a powerful CPU and loads of RAM or even a powerful GPU to crack passwords with hashcat. But for me personally, it ain't worth anything if you can't use it for a couple of hours without having to worry about being close to a power source/outlet.

I have a crappy used Asus netbook with a small duo-core processor, 2 gigs of RAM but it does however have a SSD drive which quickens up boot time and general use. But the thing weighs almost nothing, it's small and since I'm mostly using the terminal, no fancy GUI or big screen is needed.

The battery life is 7 hours. I can practically do anything. Cracking passwords on the other hand is very slow, so I do it at home on my freak of a computer.

So let's compare the two

Gaming laptop:

Expensive, big and clunky, probably rubbish battery life, will you really crack passwords with this?

shitty netbook:

dirt cheap, small, lightweight, get's the job done.

That's how I roll, I hope it helped :)

Edited by spazi
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Yea thanks, I totally agree. Battery power and being lightweight are priorities. Im not too concerned about processing speed, and i can always add more ram, and whatever I get will have an ssd. I'm mainly concerned about things like the WiFi card inside and it having USB ports. Don't need a ROM drive, but I'd like to at least have one with a semi spaced out keyboard. I had an Acer netbook too, but the keys were so crammed together, it was hard to not hit two keys at once. I want something light, but not too small. I'd prefer one that could tri-boot win/Linux/and Mac without too many issues, but its not a necessity.

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I was actually lucky, my laptop had a wifi chipset that supported monitor mode and packet injection. I do believe it's possible to remove the mini-pci card containing the wifi chipset and installing maybe an atheros 9k series chipset. Stuff you find on ebay :)

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I was actually lucky, my laptop had a wifi chipset that supported monitor mode and packet injection. I do believe it's possible to remove the mini-pci card containing the wifi chipset and installing maybe an atheros 9k series chipset. Stuff you find on ebay :)

May i add. And try to avoid those awfull intel ones....

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What about a MacBook that dual boots kali, Would I regret loosing windows that much? Normally I wouldn't bother with a Mac because of pricing, but I'm finding some fairly cheap MacBooks in my area on Craigslist. I've never made the transition to OSX, so how much would it limit me?

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I've been rockin' HP/Compaq Business Class laptops for the last year. My current bunch are two, HP/Compaq nc6400's with Core Duo(32bit) 1.83GHz processors, 2GB of DDR2-533MHz RAM and 14.1" screens and a HP/Compaq nc4400, Core 2 Duo(64bit) 2.0GHz processor, 2GB's of DDR2-667MHz RAM and 12.1" screen. All three are running Kali Linux 1.0.6 and all three run stable and fast(IMHO) with no problems.

As long as you're running a good Linux Distro you don't need all the processor power in the world or a boat load of RAM. Now if you're going with Windows 7 then you'll need more power and more RAM since Windows is a resource hog In my opinion but with Linux any decent dual core with 2- GB's of RAM will do well enough. Also, you can normally pick up a good condition, used HP Business class laptop for $50-$100 depending on what it is on EBay which leaves plenty of money left for any upgrades you want to do like more RAM or an SSD, extra batteries, new A/C adapter, carrying case, ect. As always, this is JMHO, YMMV.

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OS X and Kali both linux, different flavours, but not that significant. I doubt it'd limit you at all unless you knowingly run some obscure Windows s/w.

OsX is Unix, not linux. There is a difference! Linux on macs can be ungodly frustrating to set up.

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Guest spazi

OsX is Unix, not linux. There is a difference! Linux on macs can be ungodly frustrating to set up.

Tell me about it, I tried installing linux on my old macbook. Took HOURS!...

After installing it, I had to manually fix the wifi and various other issues. Waste of time :P

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