I agree with you David. Only thing I would add is it is important to know how the machine will be used. You are right. I have a 12 year old Toshiba that has a 1G Celeron and 256mb of ram. I was able to load and test Qmail Toaster on CentOS 5.

However I would never want to do any Drupal development on it. I think short of doing some serious manipulation of tons of data an i3 with virtualization turned on and 4GB of RAM should do just fine. I would expect to be able to run Drupal Commerce localhost with little problem and Drupal Commerce is a resource hog.

I would not go below an i3 for any serious dev work unless you are doing some basic LAMP dev. Or just email and web.

As you pointed out the prices have fallen substantially.

I think the actual question was about heat though.



On 2014-08-12 23:58, David Schwartz wrote:
I’m surprized that people even bother asking questions like this these
days, especially when it comes to Linux.

You can run Linux in a system with an 800 MHz Atom CPU, 256 MB of RAM
and 20 GB HDD and it runs just fine.

There are tiny Media boxes you can get for $50 that have 1.2 GHz ARMs,
4 GB of RAM, gigabit WiFi, and you can plug in as much storage as you
want via USB.

My 10-year old Dell Inspiron 9300 has a 1.6 GHz Centrino CPU, 3 GB of
RAM, and a 120 GB HDD, and while it’s slow to boot Win XP, it runs
most apps just fine. (It needs a new battery, tho.)

My current machine is a MacBook Pro with a 2.7 GHz quad-core i7, 768
GB SSD, and 16 GB of RAM. I run it with a second 24” HD display, and
it’s configured with 20 desktops (10 up and 10 down). I do all of my
Windows development in a VMWare VM running Windows 7. It’s fast and I
suspect will last a very long time. And under the hood, it’s running
some Unix variant (Mach, which is I think a BSD derivative).

The thing that kills it  (and every other computer I use) is browser
windows. Browsers leak memory like crazy. Every one of them.

Last fall I bought an ASUS laptop with Win 7 on it from Best Buy for
$275 because MS was about to ship Win 8, so the retailers were
flushing out everything at a big discount. I don’t even remember how
it’s configured, only that it was a screaming deal at the time.

Buy whatever you can afford that’s fairly new. It’ll probably work just fine.

As for the disk … I’d recommend a Seagate Hybrid Drive. Get the 1TB
with 8 or 16 GB of cache. They’re under $100 and nearly as fast as an
SSD.

(BTW, a word of warning: once you go hybrid or SSD, you’ll want to
poke your eyes out waiting for stuff to open up on machines with
regular HDDs on them!)

-David



On Aug 12, 2014, at 5:25 PM, Mark Phillips <[email protected]> wrote:

Does anyone use an Dell XPS15 or M3800 laptop? I am looking at these two models, or perhaps the developer edition with Ubuntu pre-installed. I have read that these machines get really hot...to the point of the machine crashing. Just wondering about anyone's personal experience.

Also, any recommendations for other brands? I am looking for a core i7, at least 8 GB or RAM, and a large SSD to run Debian. Many of the "native linux" machines are huge and thick....I liked these two Dell models as they have a sleeker design and don't weigh 10 lbs.

Any thoughts on whether to have a small SSD for the OS and a companion hard drive for data, or just blow a wad on a huge SSD (1 TB) for both OS and data?

Thanks,

Mark

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