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you should take a look at WPI, the Windows Post Install wizard.
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hardware upgrades are only needed if new software needs more power. As the Vista Windows needs more power. So Windows 7 wont need new hardware. 
Greetings from Germany
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True! 
My upgrades are usually memory.
Even Vista, from my experience, if the XP box was decent, a new pair of DIMM's pushing it to 4Gb and a not so bad graphic card if you care about Aero will do the trick.
Vista needs memory... feed it!
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I buy a new laptop each 4-5 years
Wormhole is the God divided by zero
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Danila Korablin wrote: I buy a new laptop each 4-5 years
Do you develop on a laptop? I have yet to find one that I would use for this purpose. The hard disk is way too slow for me to do real work and I can not type at all on the small keys of the keyboard.
[EDIT]I forgot one. The display is way too small. [/EDIT]
John
modified on Monday, March 9, 2009 1:26 PM
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I also develop on a laptop.
I got a 17" monitor which gave me a full keyboard.
Now work follows me very easily - anywhere I go.
I don't think I would switch back to a PC machine unless I really needed a LOT more power.
Miro
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I am in a similar situation. A little over a year ago, I replaced my 3-4yo dev PC with a new laptop. Our small group of developers discussed whether we would want to replace the desktop or get a laptop for roaming/taking home and also getting a newer PC. We decided to not spend more of the company's money on the extra PC and went to straight laptops. I am personally very pleased with our decision. I have a full powered laptop now and at my desk (with dual 19" monitors, external mouse/keyboard on my docking station) I can't tell the difference. When coding at home or away from my desk, I have a speedy machine with me. I don't think I would go back now.
The only drawback is not having a PC to run processes overnight, but my old dev PC is still available for that and we can get newer PCs in a pinch if needed for certain tasks. For me, when using the laptop by itself, I do have a smaller screen and keyboard but I can comfortably switch at home or elsewhere. If I had to work strictly on my laptop screen all the time, I would definitely find that prohibitive with the reduced screen real estate, but power-wise, I would be fine.
-Wayne
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aaah, so you also live in the land where monitors distribute keyboards. 
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I have a 17" widescreen laptop @ 1920x1600, and a 7200RPM HD... works well for me, but then for some reason I like the laptop-style keyboards. The laptop is important for me because when I travel, I can take my work environment with me, which means as a self-employed consultant I can afford to do so more often.
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John M. Drescher wrote: Do you develop on a laptop?
I've been developing on laptop for 8+ years (except for 1 year in 2007)
John M. Drescher wrote: The hard disk is way too slow
many laptops come with low budget HDD. I have seen laptops with 4200 rpm and terrible seek time. look for the spec before buying anything, or opt for an upgrade.
John M. Drescher wrote: and I can not type at all on the small keys of the keyboard.
yea, that sucks. I use external keybaord and monitor, both at home and at the office. It is rarely I run the laptop solo.
The biggest benefit I get from the laptop is work portability. I don't have to recreate my environment both at home and work ( I telecommute couple days a week) and I don't like working over vpn. They are to check email and stuff life that, but to be connected for long time, not my taste.
Yusuf
Oh didn't you notice, analogous to square roots, they recently introduced rectangular, circular, and diamond roots to determine the size of the corresponding shapes when given the area. Luc Pattyn[^]
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John M. Drescher wrote: The display is way too small.
And also connected to keyboard. I have to look down all the time. So I don't use laptops as well.
"In the end it's a little boy expressing himself." Yanni
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John M. Drescher wrote: Do you develop on a laptop?
Yes, a 17" with full size keyboard. When at my work desk I have another 17" screen and lots more storage over the network on a server and for backups NDAS drives. I do lots of work outside my desk and a portable machine is a must. When I need more power I use my server.
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The 1GHz machines from a few years back run Visual Studio just fine. If I was a gamer, I might enter the upgrade loop, but as I'm not, I prefer to spend the extra money on books.
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The last thing I upgraded was my RAM (2GB -> 3GB) and bought a 600GB external.
The next upgrade will probably be for gaming purposes (New graphics card), or another External (They always seem to run outta space... :p)
-= Reelix =-
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They might run small projects fine, but an older machine will definately bog down on larger solutions(I'm talking like 30+ projects), especially web apps. Debugging applications that do a lot of memory manipulation is also considerably more enjoyable on a fast PC.
We also target Vista/Win7 with some of our applications, and I wouldn't touch Vista with a 10 foot pole without a decent dual core processor.
With good PC's going for $400 brand new with 2GB ram and core 2 duo processors these days, sacrificing developer efficiency to save on hardware costs just doesn't make sense in my opinion.
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I went from a Windows XP x64 machine with 8GB Ram, 500GB HDD, Dual 24" 1920x1200 screens provided by my employer in 2007, to an Acer 9" Aspire One with 1GB RAM, and a 9" 1024x600 screen in 2008/2009.
This is because I'm now have my own contracting company and am moving around a lot in a sales and development role, so I needed something really portable.
Gives me a whole new perspective on GUI layout working on a 1024x600 screen. Has made me a lot more conservative in how much non functional clutter I put in the user interface.
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John Stewien wrote:
Gives me a whole new perspective on GUI layout working on a 1024x600 screen. Has made me a lot more conservative in how much non functional clutter I put in the user interface.
thank you, from my parents, who have a hard time reading fine print, so they run their screen in 600X400! so the letters are bigger..
and thank you from me, being a nomad(i.e. semi-officeless right now...) my development computer has by necessity become my laptop(s) and poor gui layout is my biggest complaint (usually)...
Thanks for remembering that not everyone uses a massive resolution screen... 
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I create rather distinctive GUI's (compared to the usual, at least) because I spent 9 year developing for Point-of-Sail. Once you have a touch-screen to work with (and 15" was all that was usually affordable for customers), the whole world changes.
1 - Territory is very precious - redraw subsections of screen with every user-event to accommodate changing context.
2 - Things have to be big enough for [fat] fingers.
3 - Had to be readable from several feet.
4 - Had to be dirt-simple obvious to use, allowing for employee turnover.
I've still not gotten over the styling.
"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: I spent 9 year developing for Point-of-Sail.
Oops, I hope you werent developing that for 9 years! (joke on typo  )
xacc.ide - now with TabsToSpaces support IronScheme - 1.0 beta 2 - out now! ((lambda (x) `((lambda (x) ,x) ',x)) '`((lambda (x) ,x) ',x))
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Now you no as well as the wrest of us - if the spell checker says it's OK - it's OK.
"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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How does that run Visual Studio btw? I was thinking of getting a netbook, and people are saying it won't have the horsepower to run Visual Studio.
Here at work I'm using VS.NET 2005 Pro, with Resharper and source control integration. Our solution is over a half million lines of code, so the studio footprint is usually 300-500 MB, not including sql; so I can see not being able to do something like that. At home I run studio express and with my other(smaller) projects the footprint is like 80MB, so I was hoping I could get away with it.
How responsive is it for you on the netbook?
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Here, I am using an Advent 4211 Laptop - 1Gb RAM, Intel Atom N270, 80Gb HD, 10" widescreen (1024x600) and have loaded it up with Apache, PHP, Python, Perl, MySQL, SQL Server Express, Sharpdevelop, VS2008 Express, ASP.NET, mono, OpenWatcom, and am happy to work on it. It takes a day or two to get used to the keyboard, but it has amazed me how much it was able to hold up...even with opera, thunderbird, and oh yeah throw in a couple of flv's and it can take it, seriously though a ram upgrade is on the way....
My 2cents,
Take care,
Tom.
#define STOOPID
#if STOOPID
Console.WriteLine("I'm stoopid!");
#endif
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Tomas Brennan wrote: seriously though a ram upgrade is on the way
Yes, my next netbook will have at least 2GB of RAM and a 1280x720 screen. I still plan on buying another netbook though when I upgrade. My family members are waiting patiently for me to cast this one aside.
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DiscoJimmy wrote: How does that run Visual Studio
I run Visual Studio 2005 Pro, and Visual Studio 2008 Pro. 2008 runs better  but they both run fine. My projects are mainly C# though, I don't have any big C++ projects that I'm working on at the moment. The drive is encrypted with true crypt, and I use TortoiseSVN for my source control client. I also have SQL Server, and PostgreSQL running. Generally I have the following running as well:
RSS Bandit
Live Mesh
Live Messenger
Skype
IE7
Excel 2003
Word 2003
Windows Live Mail
Paint.NET
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