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