[development] Development platform?

[Jeff Greenberg]

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