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Last place head IT took zero notice when filling out a inventory stock that my machine was 6+ years old, Win7 and the Dell model which takes a moment to check that it is not Win10 supported, the graphics chipset was not supported for Win10.
So what did they do, force overnight a Win10 upgrade, because it was listed as Win7. Not the previously expected result mentioned months before that it would be replaced with a new machine.
Come in. Oh, looks different. only 1 monitor working, odd?
Install driver, driver crashed. Reverting to windows basic display driver.
1 monitor helped focus. Good thing my job had no need for a dedicated graphics processor.
Okay, well I got work to crack on with.
Getting a new development machine was not on any list of requirements when I was changing companies, but looking down at a XPS 15 laptop, with some 16Gb ram, all of the CPUs, does help point out the slivers of time saved by speeding past.
Especially when adding in that Windows 10 complains about reboots once a week, where my Win7 could power through for 2 months before I considered rebooting for updates.
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My current Employer supplied rig is only 6 months old.. The "main" personal rig is about to turn 4 years old.
I have a Dell Inspiron 7000 (circa 1999) later updated to 7500 guts that I kept on hand for an old .NET 1.0 app. Client wasn't interested in migration/updating the app at the time.. For legacy .NET 1.0/2.0 apps, it was easier to just keep VS2005 on it instead of going VM.. Up until about 3 years ago, it was also a QA/File server as I had to maintain an app that needed XP compatibility. Now thankfully, ALL of those old client apps have been buried with them finally moving past Windows XP.
About the only thing that unit is used for today is the occasional nostalgia of when I want to pull out the library of Iomega ZIP 100 disks since it was THE original source code repo backup since I never did get an optical writer. Also the only way I can access those ZIP disks anymore.
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It was here when I got here. Some previous developer's machine.
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It's so old, that when I tip it, all the heaven and earth beads slide to one side. 
“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” - Chinese Proverb
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Dell Precision T5810 - 32GB RAM 8 3.5GHz cores - Win7 (by general developer demand). They bought four. I don't feel so special.
It has more power than I'll need while I continue to work for them. Only a couple of years old.
My personal pick would have been more conventional (using, at the time, the comparatively new DDR4 for future compatibility ease) - an i7 gamer box. The view was, since the brute power at this point was irrelevant, it would be easier to maintain, repair, and upgrade. They all shook their heads "Yes - good thinking" and then went and ignored it.
What Me Worry?
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I like my Precision 7510 Xeon. I can pop up an entire chain of VMs and immediately regression test changes to distributed applications.
Plus non-existent build times are nice.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
- Hanlon's Razor
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Makes perfect sense for you.
They have me now work on web development (vs. original C++) - so what do I get with all that power and speed? Pretty much the same performance as a $200 Dell refurb! The only place I really make any use of it at all is photo-editing - which is pauseless. I do that "around here", but really, the less expensive and more serviceable i7 gamer would probably be better with the video.
My view was for something that will have easy-to-maintain (repairs, upgrades) components for a long time. No special memory, etc.
Where all that horsepower could have done some good is as a server.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Sure, but on the other side of the coin, these Precisions are actually really well put together, and the Xeon class is unlikely to need replacement for many, many years.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
- Hanlon's Razor
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Nathan Minier wrote: unlikely to need replacement for many, many years.
True - this Xeon replace a previous 1-core 3MHz Xeon. The last survivor of six.
The problem is that what you said was just right - and I was stuck with it for ten years!
A lot of things change in that time that are just not part of the old tech. Sometimes it's better to have it wear out so one can catch up with, at the least, yesterday.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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And we all have been issued maxed out Lenovo P1s
Some of the machines replaced were pushing 6 or 7 years old
Director of Transmogrification Services
Shinobi of Query Language
Master of Yoda Conditional
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A better question would be "How long do you keep your development machine?" This way you don't skew the results towards those who have just replaced an older machine.
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Agreed. I just replaced a 5 year old machine.
I usually run a box for 3 to 5 years... during which I do at least one major hardware update.
Mark
Just another cog in the wheel
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 My previous system (replaced 1.5 years ago) was built when Win 7 came out in 2009. Even though it's 10 y/o, it still works fine. I hope to get 10 years out of the new system.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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.. is all roughly the same, except Skylake X and the only thing you really get is AVX512, which only matters if you use it.
Ice Lake may be the first serious improvement, but as long as only low-power parts exist it effectively does not exist.
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Fortunately not mine but another division here purchased new stations for their group. The person in charge decided to save a couple hundred dollars on each machine by getting the i7-5000 series(circa mid-2014) instead of the i5-8000 processors.
i7 means it is better than i5 right? 
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I know what you're saying. An 8th gen i5 will run circles around those 5th gen i7 ones.
I have a feeling that companies like Intel are banking on the ignorance of common people. People who don't know any better will think "i7 is better than i5" without looking at the specs, so Intel gets to sell more of the old sh*t, so why not milk that i7 name.
Unscrupulous ba$tard$.
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I think that an unconditional "A is better than B" is an overly simplistic approach.
I bought a machine around the time when the first i7 arrived. It was the first x86 to have three high-performance memory channels, and I was working with tools that were shuffeling tons of data around in memory, but not very CPU intensive, so e.g. clock speed had little effect on the performance.
Later, I have been on projects with data that could almost fit in cache, but requiring a lot of CPU work, so clock speed and microarchitecture turned out to be essential; memory channels were "almost idle".
Software achitecture and peripheral software may have a great impact. The SketchUp 3D drawing system came in a new version that delegated lots of the graphic processing to your advanced Graphics card - if you had one. I bought one, and drawing times were reduced to a fraction, while CPU load dropped to a fraction. (The previous SU version made very little use of the graphics card functionality; it didn't matter much if you had a top rate or an El Cheapo card.)
Looking back at my old University: They ran a Cray-1 for a number of years. It was replaced not to get more CPU power, but to get more I/O capacity. When running e.g. wheather forecasts, even 20 DMA channels was a bottleneck.
You may have other tradeoffs. What is the cost of interrupt handling? That depends on how much you depend on interrupts. Can the CPU support a chipset that provides the I/O-standards that you need? Can the CPU support the amount of physical RAM that you need? Is the power consumption low enough to run the machine on a battery, or does it require water cooling?
Lots of such variations. For one specific application you may certainly conclude that "A is better than B", but not as a geneal unqualified statement.
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Was completely OS-reinstalled last December.
Still a beast :
xeon w-2133 @ 3.6ghz, 64gig memory, Quadro p4000.
since I cannot install games, I don't know if it can run Crysis. 
I'd rather be phishing!
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Wow, there was at least one person who voted that. Dude, whoever you are, please let me buy you a sandwich. 
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If their dev machine is over 25 year's old, are you sure they can bite into a sandwich still? May need to offer pudding or mashed potatoes instead. 
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Must be one of those mainframes.
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Entirely possible.
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Amarnath S wrote: Must be one of those mainframes.
was going to say the same thing. my guess though is that this developer is still using a relatively new machine to access that older mainframe machine.
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Not necessarily. I've still gotten a 25+ year old Win 3.11 PC sitting in my home office, for the reason that it has a 5.25" floppy drive. Or rather, the last time I turned it on was because a friend of mine wanted me to check if his old floppies were still readable (they were!). I've got a couple other rather outdated interfaces to it as well, such as a MIDI interface card, an interface card for a tape cassette unit, and for a hand scanner. The cards are for old bus systems, so I can't move them to a newer machine. (For the MIDI, I could of course buy a brand new USB based MIDI interface, but not for the other two.)
I am not doing any development on this machine, but if you work as a consultant, you should be prepared for the strangest requests. If I was offered a six man months project on adding some new functions to a 16-bit Windows program system (that is entirely possible, even today!), I guess I would take it. Then, this Win 3.11 machine would be my development environment (it has a C++ compiler and debugger - but I have forgotten the name of the debugger!), and for a period my main development machine would have been 25+ years old.
I haven't had such a project, but about fifteen years ago a fellow came with a pile of 8" floppies (I guess most of you have never seen a real-life 8" floppy!). "I think these may contain some essential data, but I don't know the format...". He couldn't tell what kind of machine or software had created them, their age (except that they were old!), nothing. He gave us a cost limit (which turned out to be high enough to get his data out).
At that time, we had an old minim machine (not a PDP-11, but same class, from around 1980) with an 8" drive and a good selection of drivers for various track/sector formatting, and I managed to get a binary dump of the floppies. Then I could start poking around. The blocks looked like line noise, so I suspected that it could be encrypted in some way. In those days, some people were still using primitive encryption (like xoring or code shifting). Octet values were indeed unevenly distributed. By plain luck I came across an EBCDIC table, and saw that the two most common octed values were the EBCDIC codes for 'e' and 't'. The very most of the contents were plain text in EBCDIC coding. The customer confirmed that the floppies might come from an old IBM system.
For this project, we at least made use of a 20+ year old machine to dump the floppies to a hard drive. Not quite "software development", but it illustrates that some projects may call for that kind of equipment.
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I've worked with 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies, but never with an 8" one. This is new to me.
About 18 years ago, when I was with GE in India, they had a bunch of test machines, about ten of them, one of which was a Win 3.11 machine, on which they wanted the software to be tested.
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