New laptop for hacking, need advise.

[Typeo]

Hi,

I'm very new at hacking. I'm 21 years old and have been into building and fixing computers for a long time now, but hacking recently has grabbed my attention. Well atm I have two good desktop computers that I built a while back, but I'm more interested in getting a laptop to do all my hacking with. What I was wanting to know is what kind of specs am I gonna be needing to be able to do some of the lower ends hacks, such as hacking into networks and such.

I do not have a lot of money to be spending since I'm a broke college student. But I was looking around and came across some fairly cheap ($300) 10" netbooks. They do not have very good specs like 1GB mem., 150GB HD, 1.6GHz CPU, and usualy a very very low end GPU.

Would something like this work? Or am I gonna need to get something with better specs to be able to do any kind of hacking?

Thanks,
Typeo

[nanamin]

Check what kind of ram the laptops will be taking. I got a really cheap Compaq laptop for like $300. Had 512 mb ram, 2 ghz amd64 processor, and an 80 gig hdd. The reason it was so cheap is because I chose the lowest amount of ram they would let me get. For every gig of ram added, they wanted $100!

So I get my laptop, go to newegg, look up the ram, and find a pack with 2 2gb sticks (4 gigs of ram total) for under $30 with free shipping. Hmm, $400 for ram, or $30? Tough choice, huh?

Definitely do your own upgrades, you'll save a ton of money and be able to build a much more powerful machine!

[Havoc Ace]

Anything is good. Seriously. Buy a cheap one and install linux. It will make it run as fast as a new laptop with Vista. Read tutorials on the site and try to complete the challenges, but remember that you should do whatever you do just for learning new skills that you find interesting, not harming anybody with your knowledge.

[Typeo]

So something like this would be more than enough to do what I would want it to do?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220504

Or possibly this since its $89 cheaper?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220441

[goffyownz]

If you are willing to spend a bit more i would go for a laptop with higher RAM, as you may have to run several programs at the same time whilst hacking
Mine does the trick,
17"
250GB HDD
3GB RAM

Good luck

[mischief]

make sure you do research about the wifi card that comes with whatever laptop you choose. my card, which uses the rt2860sta driver, isn't supported by aircrack. but my $5 USB wifi card is, oddly :<

so make sure you find a supported card

[insomaniacal]

Do not get a laptop that has an rtl8187 wifi card.

The drivers for this are buggy at best, in Linux at least. Any usb wifi adapter with the rt2500 chipset works great though!

[mischief]

Do not get a laptop that has an rtl8187 wifi card.

my USB wifi card has an rtl8187 chipset and it works fine with aircrack. what's the matter with yours..? what kernel are you running?

[insomaniacal]

I'm running 2.6.28.1 , with default settings as they come with Backtrack 4. It's actually the first time I've been able to use the Linux driver with any level of success. However, it drops connections (usually) after a few hours, and refuses to reconnect, even after unloading and reloading the driver with modprobe.

However, my card is weird in general. It's one of those internal cards that uses a USB interface to interact with the system, and I'm guessing it was somewhat modified, which may be why it doesn't play nice with any driver that isn't it's Windows driver (In the past, I've been forced to use Ndiswrapper for networking in Linux).

[mischief]

uh, well, using backtrack 4 as a desktop OS might be the root of your problems maybe getting a new kernel would fix your wifi problems, depending on your card model. some cards become better supported as newer kernels come out.