My own $0.02... Buy the best machine you can afford to today, or wait. There will always be a better deal in a month, it's the nature of the beast. And price vs performance is always a subjective matter. The i5 will have a longer useful lifetime, but I don't know how often you change your rig (I run about a 4 year cycle, and try to buy with that in mind).
During development, 99.999% of the time either machine will be waiting on you... I've watched my quad-core Phenom II's work loads (who hasn't popped up that cpu usage window and left it there for a while?) and it rarely spikes above 30% in aggregate except when running automated test suites - at that point, it is satisfying. Cores/processor speed aside, when I bumped the RAM in my rig from 4Gig to 8Gig, now that was satisfying. If you can load up the used Thinkpad with 8 Gig, that might be the winner for me. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-t...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
