While I was at Rite Aid, I knew a number of people who had laptops, but used them as desktops, in conjunction with a docking station.

In recent years, the docking station has fallen out of favor with alpha geeks, since modern laptops rarely need the simple port expansions docking stations provide.

Some time ago, Bob and I designed the ultimate computational rig, and discovered that a few select motherboards support secondary daughtercards that significantly extend the motherboard's capabilities - Tyan's Thunder n4250QE actually supports up to four extra processors and up to 64 GB of extra RAM for those processors by means of such a daughtercard.

After this research was completed, I realized that there is unrealized potential in the concept of the docking station.

Laptops simply don't have space for some things. For instance, while a tower may easily contain a RAID array of several drives, fitting that into a laptop is very challenging.

Similarly, putting a serious video card into a laptop is a non-option - they just don't fit.

So, here's where the docking station _should_ shine.

The 'docking station' for my dream laptop would look a lot like a desktop workstation. It would have several PCI slots, and plenty of ATA and SATA slots. There might even be some additional CPU and RAM slots.

When you brought your laptop to your workstation and plugged it in, you could continue to work normally, using the keyboard, mouse, and monitor attached to your docking station, in much the way current docking stations work.

For any significant advantage, though, you would have to restart your machine.

At that point, the expanded, souped-up daughterboard would be recognized by your laptop's motherboard, and voila, you now have everything on the docking station's daughterboard at your disposal - in my case, I think I'd have some high-powered video cards, and maybe a RAID array. Some spare processors and RAM might even be nice.

I know very little about hardware, but it seems to me that if Tyan could create the Thunder n4250QE, then this must be fairly achievable.

I can't be the only person who wants this.