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Developing on MAC = installing a VMWare with windows = the same as not having a MAC...
And software integration in MAC way is not what i'd like. Do you know that a super program exist for navigation via MAC, and that the company cannot sell the SW, because MAC has to approve it? It smeells like a legal way of blackmailing... The marketing politics is what i dislike in MAC. Otherwise it may be good...but still, if 2 stuff can do the same (quality, support and almost everything), why buy the expensive one?
C#, ASPX, SQL, novice to NHibernate
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This is my second machine in about six years. I only upgraded because my old one broke and I wanted another one as quickly as possible. My old one had an 80 GB hard drive and 384 MB of RAM. It ran Windows XP, Visual Studio and Firefox relatively well. Since then, I've upgraded to an Acer M1640 with a 250 GB hard drive and 2 GB of memory. It runs everything my old machine used to, only on Windows Vista (soon to buy Windows 7)
Really, most people don't need a quad-core, 3.142 GHz processor with an 8 TB hard drive and some other vast amount of memory. As long as it gets the task done and I feel comfortable, I'll use it; I don't play games, and if the system requirements for an application require me to get a new computer, then I just won't buy the application. Chances are there's another application out there (or I can whip one up) which can perform the action I need to, with far less memory consumption
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I would have liked to see "Whenever the powers that be feel like doing it"
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This is more like when I add small priced items ($100 or less). But replacing the main components (CPU/mobo) is around every 2 years. Sometimes shorter sometimes longer.
My big interest for a future purchase are SSDs and blueray writers. I am waiting till I can get a 250GB SSD that nets over 150MB/s writes and costs less than $100 US. I am also waiting for a $100 blue ray writer with write once media that costs $1 / disk.
John
modified on Monday, March 9, 2009 3:12 PM
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And its variant "whenever the Powers That Be let me".
Software Zen: delete this;
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For most of my career, my desktop PC has merely been a glorified dumb terminus for developing on "real" computers.
Then and more recently (using .net) I only got to upgrade when the previous system died.
As for my home systems:
My most recent upgrade (January 2009) was because Fry's had a good deal on a Core 2 Quad.
The previous upgrade (summer 2005) was because the previous system had died.
I had built that system after WinXP came out (late 2001).
Prior to that, I had a system that I had built when I upgraded from Win3.11 to Win98se (because I wanted to use Photoshop).
I'm pretty sure that before that I was still using what had begun as a 486SX in 1992, along the way it got more RAM, HDDs, and an Overdrive chip.
My current system should still be sufficient if I choose to install Win7 when it comes out.
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My financial circumstances dictate that this is also the case for me.
My current system is about two years old and unfortunately the increase in energy prices and the recent cold weather have almost wiped out my 'new system pot'.
It therefore looks like, barring a catastrophic failure, this one is going to have to last at least 4 years, if not more.
Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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But that is a difficult question to answer because I have no schedule and I add items that are less than $100 frequently. At home I upgraded the main development box in late November because the price was right. With the help of live.com it was around $400 US for a 2.83GHz quad core Q9550 + 6GB of quality ddr2 memory + a quality motherboard (ASUS P5Q pro) + 650W ANTEC 80+ power supply. This upgrade is 1.5 to 3 times as fast (at building code) as the dual core machine it replaced and it consumes less power at idle and significantly less at full load.
John
modified on Monday, March 9, 2009 12:21 PM
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You r right, I have no schedule too. I upgrade the system when the price is good or say low.
I think servey has missing option : When Price is Low 
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I'm currently doing a proof-of-concept, and was given a P3 with 384 MB RAM and 10 GB HD.
It's running fine . . .
That's because it's running Ubuntu Server 8.10.
So, imagine how it could be if most people ran Ubuntu and other Linuxes.
Upgrade because the old beast is just too tired do play any more - and not because you're forced to support the new market of the latest and greatest - which cannot run on your current system. And, Ubuntu (at least) allows you to image the setup on a USB flash drive - so cloning becomes rather easy (Did you hear that, Bill?)
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"How do you find out if you're unwanted if everyone you try to ask tells you to stop bothering them and just go away?" - Balboos HaGadol
"It's a sad state of affairs, indeed, when you start reading my tag lines for some sort of enlightenment. Sadder still, if that's where you need to find it." - Balboos HaGadol
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Balboos wrote: So, imagine how it could be if most people ran Ubuntu and other Linuxes.
Nothing to imagine - until last year Linux was my primary dev environment. Linux needs fewer resources than Windows only if you install less functionality. A Linux desktop with features comparable to Windows will consume more resources than WIndows. We were running OpenSuse and it was visibly slower than Windows XP on the same hardware. Then I installed a bare-bones CentOS (without a graphic desktop environment) and accessed it from a Windows machine with putty - it ran like a charm.
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: Linux needs fewer resources than Windows only if you install less functionality. A Linux desktop with features comparable to Windows will consume more resources than WIndows.
Isn't that exactly the point? In general, who needs all of Windows' functionality? Each version contains additional layers of bloat. That you can bog down Linux? That's no surprise - why not? The point is how little is required to run pretty much every application that 'users' need.
What do developers need? Lots of extras - as noted by others, it also takes me days to load a fresh install. As a general case, software (often) doesn't even run the same on development systems. Haven't you ever said "Well, it works on my machine" ?
A substantial driving force behind the (major) developer upgrades is that the consumers are buying physical system/operating-system combination of ever increasing magnitude. Vista came out and so much software was broken - and then the dev's need a Vista-capable PC if they want to develope for Vista.
I don't see this particular scenario as part of Linux - perhaps due to the nature of open-source systems and applications: Allow - but do not mandate.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"How do you find out if you're unwanted if everyone you try to ask tells you to stop bothering them and just go away?" - Balboos HaGadol
"It's a sad state of affairs, indeed, when you start reading my tag lines for some sort of enlightenment. Sadder still, if that's where you need to find it." - Balboos HaGadol
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: A Linux desktop with features comparable to Windows will consume more resources than Windows.
I know this not to be true, both in servers and desktops, from extensive experience with both OSs (except Windows 7) for more than 10 years. Windows has always required more disk space and more RAM than GNU/Linux for similar environments and work loads.
Performance is far more difficult to compare but I can give some examples (e.g. 3D desktop, desktop responsiveness under heavy disk load, network transfers on gigabit ethernet, MySQL, Apache, GIMP) where GNU/Linux clearly outperforms Windows and some (e.g. ATI 3D OpenGL, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird) Windows outperforms GNU/Linux.
Application and driver performance probably depends more on the amount of effort the developers put in optimizing it for a particular OS than on the OS performance itself, making performance comparisons more difficult and potentially misleading.
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PedroMC wrote: I know this not to be true
You know this not to be true, I know this to be true - to each his own 
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Fair enough! 
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I replace my dev box roughly each year, and recycle the old one as a server.
However, I upgrade continuously.
I have added 1TB of RAID 1 disk and another 8GB RAM to my current dev box since I built it about 9 months ago. It has a motherboard that supports the new 1600MHz FSB Xeons, as I hoped that I could plug in a pair of E5472's, but they are still too expensive so I guess my E5420's will stay.
I spend about £1500 ( $2000 ) per year on hardware which is about a week's pay. I buy 'economy' parts, because the premium for the 'latest and greatest' is not warranted IMHO. However, I have had dual processors, RAID 1 disks and plenty of RAM in all my boxes since '95.
Nick
----------------------------------
Be excellent to each other
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i think the problem is not to upgrade the hardware,
the problem is to setup everything on the new hardware, for me as driver developer it takes about 2 days until everything is installed
everytime i need to install:
msvs2003
msvs2005
msvs2008
directx sdk
windows ddk
our own library
windows media sdk
wxwidgets
vmware
eclipse
java
and many many other things, and to much updates
i hope that microsoft includes in the next windows a system to transfer EVERYTHING inclunding the software and not only the files and documents
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My development environments are installed in VMWare virtual machines. So my time to upgrade is only an hour or so:
- Install VMWare
- Copy virtual machines
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Does that really work with product codes, changes for hardware drivers etc?
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A VMWare image stores the entire state of a machine. It should work
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 Well unless you have one of the latest hardware-vm cpus, virtual machines tend to be slower than running your tools on the real hardware, especially with an ring 0-intensive OS such as Windows. So until recently (much more recently than latest hardware replacement), this was not much of an option.
 I might consider it next time round though.
This message is hasty and is not to be taken as serious, professional or legally binding.
I work with low level C/C++ in user and kernel mode, but also dabble in other areas.
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I am running a W2K8 Server with virtual machines for development, and god, it flies!
modified on Tuesday, March 10, 2009 10:32 AM
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Until recently W2K8 was not available...
Two questions:
- On what CPU does W2K8 virtual machines fly?
- Is the guest OS W2K8 too (W2K8 in a W2K8 VM uses private speedup tricks to avoid heavy instruction by instruction Ring 0 emulation, these are not available if either host or guest is an older Windows version such as XP).
This message is hasty and is not to be taken as serious, professional or legally binding.
I work with low level C/C++ in user and kernel mode, but also dabble in other areas.
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It's an... ummm good dual core - I'll check the specs tomorrow if you like.
Guests are XP and W2K3. I haven't compared to running them natively, but I am generally hapyp with the performance.
The one comparison I have is a VMWare Windows 2000 guest (can't use Virtual PC on that). Of course it flies against the original PC - some mass market machine from 2000 - but it also builds the main project in about 80% time of my main development PC which is mostly stumped by not-so-fast disks.
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you should take a look at WPI, the Windows Post Install wizard.
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