Yazel, David J. wrote:

> I am designing a new development system which I am hoping will get me
> through the next 3 years.  I was wondering if people have any experience
> with this and could offer suggestions.


First part - been developing on this laptop with Win2K for just over 12
months and about 3-4 months on a desktop before that. It works.
Performance isn't scintillating compared to running linux on the same
hardware, but it is livable. At least it doesn't crash 3 times a day....

Now, for your hardware, I would make two suggestions - If you are going
to spend that amount of money on the machine, at least put SCSI disks
in. For development purposes it will make a *huge* amount of difference.
  I had for years a P166 with UW scsi disks in it and I had no trouble
keeping up with much faster boxes. About the time I felt I needed to
shift up a cog was with the release of the 600MHz systems. I would
develop on that in preference to the 533MHz Celery box with IDE sitting
next to it.

Second change is to the CPU. I haven't seen any benchmarks or reviews
yet that convince me the price premium for the P4 chips are worth it. In
addition, the huge cost difference between RDRAM and DDR-SDRAM is huge.
If you were doing a lot of streaming work, such as video, then the P4 is
worth the money. For everything else, including 3D graphics, the far
superior floating point performance of the Athlon chips, coupled with
the much cheaper DDR will save you a lot of money. In addition, if you
are going to be doing a lot of Java3D work, I think you would be better
off getting slightly slower (ie cheaper) CPUs, but putting two in.

--
Justin Couch                         http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Freelance Java Consultant                  http://www.yumetech.com/
Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer                  http://www.j3d.org/
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"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
                                               - Greg Bear, Slant
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