I was quite lucky when I came on board with my employer as they basically said that I could spec my own laptop prior to me starting (providing it was a Lenovo!). I choose the Lenovo E520 Edge which gave me the balance between keeping costs realistic, portability & the performance I needed (Core i5, 2.30 Ghz, 4 Gb RAM, 500Gb HDD). I do use an additional 21" screen via the VGA out on the laptop (don't really have the need for any other monitors at the moment as we only have a few servers running a maximum of 2 SQL Server instances each and in conjunction with the laptop screen it works well enough (for now!). I'd love to have been able to spec up the actual servers as well though - maybe in a couple years we'll look to upgrade!!?? 😀