Firefox can and does peg the CPU on Windows for no apparent reason after a while. Try killing Firefox and working without it and see how it is. But 3 GB is not enough for Vista. A developer machine should have a minimum 4G RAM and ideally 8, especially if you're running a VM. I run a Linux image inside VirtualBox too for development and I don't get any performance issues on my quad-core with 8GB. Although it doesn't eat up as much resources as Windows, a full GNOME or KDE desktop environment is very heavy, especially with all the stuff Ubuntu must pack in. If you don't use a graphical environment your Linux image memory requirements will barely scrape 512MB. I use mostly ssh + screen + vim and although the learning curve is high I'm now very productive with them.
Allister. On 10 September 2010 23:44, Jeff Greenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm curious to hear what others are using as a development platform. I'm > dying a slooooooow motion death on mine. I have a 2GHz dual-core laptop with > 3Gb of memory running Vista. I decided I wanted to develop on Linux, so I'm > running Vbox with Ubuntu 10.4 as the guest, with 1.5Gb of memory and 50Gb of > disk (only using about 8) alloted to it. > > > As I type this message, the letters appear a second or two after I've typed > them (thankfully I'm a touch typer and it buffers). Don't even ask about > running update.php or bringing up the modules page...several minutes each. > In looking at the resource monitor, it's not memory (no paging is going on) > but the CPU is pegged. All I have running is firefox, chrome and thunderbird > at the moment. Jedit, which is much lighter than JavaBeans, etc., runs > painfully slow too. > > > So...ANY ideas (short of tossing the laptop and buying a real workstation) > would be greatly appreciated! > > > Jeff > >
