I currently have a 4gb memory, 500 gb HDD laptop and I've been looking into buying a nice laptop or desktop. What specs would you recommend for my new machine?

and I've been reading post about how alot of members have2-5 computers and a bunch of equipment. I thought vmware was used so you dont have to buy or use so many actual computers.  I dont know, I'm a newbie..forgive me

thanks for the advice... how much memory would you recommend 4,6,8?  and should I get a laptop or desktop..desktop would be cheaper, but it would be cool to take my pentest lab with me where ever i went.

My current pc is 64 bits, but Ill look at getting a new SSD.



oh yeah, how much is a lot of ram? 750, 1tb?

Assuming you mean storage / hard disk, not 'RAM'. ;-)

Just depends on how many targets and snapshots you want to build / keep...  For me, it's pretty large storage (I have multiple TB of attack target images)

You can never have enough RAM. Get as much as you can afford or as much as your motherboard can handle. From a HD perspective, I dont actually use that much. My biggest HD is 2TB but that is only for backups.

Think about it this way, if all your VMs are just for pwning and testing, they're not going to use a lot of RAM nor are they going have big vmdk files. So, unless you want every flavor of every Operating System ever created, you dont really need that much. I think 150 GB is probably enough. Like I said above, I have about 5 VMs, they're all on a drive that is 128 GB, in addition to my OS and I still have plenty of space left.

However, Hayabusa brings up a good point about snapshots, if you're going to use them, then make sure you have enough space! I use snaps lightly so I dont need too much extra space for them.