Where I work, all laptops are required to have full disk encryption. These are windows laptops, and includes the swap file. And this includes developer machines. Building large source trees on a machine with this encryption just isn't realistically feasible, but its what were expected to do...

The security people tested it out first of course - on some support machines that do nothing more than email and word. And because it worked well enough there it was rolled out compony-wide...

I wonder if any of the candidates will take note of this and pledge to stop patent trolls in order to bring more jobs back...

Its a small detail, but with the growing number of usb charging devices, having places to plug them in direct is a huge benefit.

I recently purchased a new laptop for myself. I spent a good few weeks talking to lots of retailers - including Dell - about getting it without Windows pre-installed. Linux installed was preferable but no OS was also an option that I would accept. None of the suppliers that I talked to would do this at all until I came across Efficient PC, who not only did exactly what I wanted but sold me Kubuntu 9.04 on my laptop the day after it was available for download.