On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 3:44 AM, Victor Kane <victorkane@gmail.com> wrote:

Two other alternatives:

1. Get an old PC/laptop nobody uses and stick Linux on it, with a minimum LAMP stack and Drupal, make a little network and you're all set. An old laptop would do great.

2. Turn your old clunker into a thin client and get a VPS on Linode or similar and put your head in the clouds. Get a decent internet connection and you're all set.
3. Back up everything, install Ubuntu on your old clunker and run windows in Vbox on top of Ubuntu. It'll still be slow, but not as slow as now (worst alternative).

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar
http://projectflowandtracker.com

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 1:11 AM, António P. P. Almeida <appa@perusio.net> wrote:

On 11 Set 2010 04h44 WEST, jeff@ayendesigns.com wrote:

> I'm curious to hear what others are using as a development
> platform. I'm dying a slooooooow motion death on mine. I have a 2GHz
> dual-core laptop with 3Gb of memory running Vista. I decided I
> wanted to develop on Linux, so I'm running Vbox with Ubuntu 10.4 as
> the guest, with 1.5Gb of memory and 50Gb of disk (only using about
> 8) alloted to it.
>

With that machine and modern OS there's no need to buy
anything. Windows as a development platform is rather poor. Unless
you're developing .NET stuff. Get a UNIX OS. It's older (70s tech)
than Windows (80s tech) but a much more solid platform. Completely
different approach, the command line is one of its greatest assets
IMHO.

Install Debian Squeeze and say goodbye to most of your problems. I'm
in a machine with less power than yours, running several Drupal dev
installs, firewall, MTA, with no problems. I dumped Apache some time
ago and run nginx exclusively.

> As I type this message, the letters appear a second or two after
> I've typed them (thankfully I'm a touch typer and it buffers). Don't
> even ask about running update.php or bringing up the modules
> page...several minutes each. In looking at the resource monitor,
> it's not memory (no paging is going on) but the CPU is pegged. All I
> have running is firefox, chrome and thunderbird at the
> moment. Jedit, which is much lighter than JavaBeans, etc., runs
> painfully slow too.

Drop Firefox and get Chromium. The new 6 beta release is a good deal
faster than the previous 5.0.375, so it seems. The chromium browser
inspector is roughly at par with firebug.

--- appa