Hi, > Who here is happy with their current development machine? Would you > care to share your hardware specs?
I got a new system last year (wha, this year flew by). Basically a Dell desktop with the Q6600 and 8gb RAM. I had 4gb RAM originally which was fine, but later upgraded so that I could do more VM stuff (VMs really are key these days, I'll admit). I run Windows 2008 Server Workstation, and soon to be Windows 7 (Win 7 is on my laptop for quite a while and I do think they really got it right this time). > I'm looking to upgrade my 7-year old desktop for something with a little > more snap. Hopefully under $1000, but it's been ages since I shopped > prices, so clue me in if I'm naive. My desktop system did come in under $1000 but I opted for the 22inch monitors and a dualy video card, which put it at about $1300 at the time (Dec 2008). > For context: This is for full-time web app development primarily in PHP, > running some flavor of Linux. Essentially no graphic design work at > all. Desktop or laptop, I'm indifferent. So for a long time I used only a laptop for development/everything, considering that the specs between desktops and laptops were basically inconsequential. I must say, though - desktop's today are something special in terms of power/performance/etc. And especially monitor real-estate and certainly price. What really switched me was that nearly all laptops are widescreen these days. I didn't like that and so tested a desktop again for real development, and frankly haven't looked back. Just to add - if you get a new laptop, get a SSD - huge difference no matter what the benchmarks say. > For the most part I've been fine with my current setup, but I recently > started using a framework which, for all I can do to it, takes 10 and 15 > seconds to render a page on this machine. I've finally decided just to > throw hardware at it. Page-load times are unnoticeable on my rented > hosting servers, so I can't really blame the framework. On this > machine, when I'm loading pages all day trying "this way" or "that > way", those 15-second page loads add up pretty fast. > > I'd love to hear any advice on what makes a good web developer's > machine. At this point I don't have a lot of places to ask, other than > vendors who'll just sell me as much as they can con me into. I'd get a nice desktop which is very reasonably priced these days. Photoshop/AI/etc work very well on these desktops too, unless you're a professional graphics person, so it serves double purposes. And with the monitor real-estate, I'm frankly a bit embarrassed that I used a laptop for so long :) I basically use my laptop to remote desktop in when I need to, and for basic code hacking with Ultraedit on the laptop (Eclipse/etc remain on my desktop but I can also always development if needed from my laptop). H _______________________________________________ New York PHP Users Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/Show-Participation
