Try partitioning your disc and installing ubuntu on a separate partition. Vista is slow on everything. If you need windows, install 7. If you do well with opensource software, ubuntu+apt is all you need. If you are considering switching your laptop and need something that just works, buy a mac. 2010/9/11 Jeff Greenberg <jeff@ayendesigns.com>:
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.
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.
So...ANY ideas (short of tossing the laptop and buying a real workstation) would be greatly appreciated!
Jeff