Suggestions for .NET developer laptop specs
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
A BluRay burner :-D
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
First spend you money on the best hardrive (IO speed, not size, store your non-VS files on another / external drive) building large VS solutions deletes and rebuilds tons of files, then get a nice CPU and RAM is relatively cheap, I wouldn't settle for less than 3GB. I'm running a Dell XPS M1530 and I'm very happy with it, but VS 2010 likes more horses. We've switched back to desktops in our office and the same money buys about 5X the build speed, so if you don't need mobile, get a nice I7 RAID0 machine...
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
What are you developing? If you're working on an enterprise system, you may want to be able to run up virtual machines to work on, which will require more RAM (to allow some for the host & some for the virtual(s)) - 4GB or more. If they provide a development environment, so you're only writing the code on your machine, and then running everything on servers, you can get away with a lot less (1-2GB). If you need to run SQL Server, that'll eat up resources too, so again, lots of RAM's good; again, at least 4GB. Battery life's good if you're on the move, but if you spend most of your time at your desk / in meetings (as most developers do) you'll be on power most of the time, so it's not so important. A good processors always nice, but so long as you've got a couple of cores, and you're not doing anything too intensive, anything should be ok. You may want to go for a larger screen as that'll be better to code on when away from your monitors; it adds a bit of weight to carry around, but unless you commute by train & have a long walk either side, your actual carry time probably won't be enough to make a difference. SSDs are great for performance, but are still really pricey (50GB SSD is still more than 500GB standard HDD), so this choice depends on whether you need the space. Generally you need at least 100GB on a developer machine (though as always, depends what you do on it), so I'd go with the HDD for now; SDD in a year or two, once the price is down. Suggestions: Vostro 1720 Advanced: £429 http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/business/4x_vostro_1720/fs.aspx?refid=4x_vostro_1720&s=bsd&cs=ukbsdt1[^] Studio 17: £535 http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/notebooks/studio-1747/pd.aspx?refid=studio-1747&s=dhs&cs=19&~oid=us~en~29~laptops_great_deals_anav_4~~[^]
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
Look into Lenovo ThinkPad W510. Might be a bit on the high side, but you get a lot, the product is solid and it should last years. Picking higher options, for around $2500 you get i7 quad-core processor, 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, 1GB discrete graphics, 15.6" 1920x1080 LED screen (although these are on backorder right now - optional touch-screen too), 8GB RAM (max is 16GB but really jacks up the price), around 8 to 12 hours battery life, Win 7 Pro 64-bit. There's a couple of reviews if you're interested. No, I'm not selling them! I'll probably be getting one when the screens are off backorder.
Mike
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
In my humble opinion, the best laptop machine for developers would be a Dell Precision Laptop with the following minimum specifications: CPU: Core i7 720QM (2GHz 6MB Cache) - Quad core (with hyperthreading this should appear as 8 cores in Task Manager) RAM: 4GB 1333MHz dual channel (preferably 6GB with triple channel memory 3x2GB) Note: 64-bit OS required for anything above 4GB RAM. HDD: 320GB 7200rpm 16MB burst cache (preferably 500GB) Graphics: NVIDIA FX3800M 1GB RAM with 2 or 3 ports (1 VGA, 1 DVI, 1 DP or whatever combination you prefer) to support multiple monitors OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (because everybody should start porting their applications to 64-bit, or planning to, if they haven't started already. Certainly the major manufacturers are (Microsoft, Adobe etc.). 64-bit capable hardware has been around for quite a few years now and, if I am not mistaken, Windows 64-bit versions have been polished over at least three iterations (Windows XP 64-bit -> Vista 64-bit -> 7 64-bit). ... and USB3 of course as this is much faster then the present USB2 standard. I leave the rest to your imagination. Without criticising specific Manufacturers or models, whatever you do don't get anything other than a precision because it has the best most comfortable keyboard for typing lots of code. Other laptops are good for end users or power users, but their keyboards leave a lot to be desired. I hope this helps.
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
I'm a .net platform developer currently wondering around a services mesh... With this kind of architecture I easily find myself with 4, 5, 6 Visual Studio's 2008 opened at the same time + one SQL SERVER Management Studio... + several services running on my machine to deliver content do the site... 4Gb is too short for me... 8Gb minimum... Still... for a couple of years I used only one laptop (a powerful ASUS G1S) as my only machine, with a 2nd monitor. Although the machine was very good, it isn't the same thing as having a desktop with 2 big monitor plus one laptop. So my current configuration is a Quad Core with 8Gb, 500Gb disk space and thinking about adding 2 more HD's to try to speed the IO, 1x 22" monitor + 1x 19" monitor. The Laptop is nothing that fancy but also have 4Gb and a cool performance. I have both computers on all the time but use only one keyboard and one mouse to control both. InputDirector is the best free tool around for this (way better than Synergy). At extreme cases where I need a 3rd monitor I use a tool called MaxiVista to extend the desktop PC desktop into the laptop screen... very coll and very very handy! :) Cheers mate! Good luck on your new job! :)
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
I wake up this morning to see that my post has all this activity and I thought to myself, man I love this place! Everyone is sooo helpful! Then I crunch through the hundreds of emails I get overnight telling me which of our batch processes decided it was time to sleep through the night and I get to my Code Project Daily News and there we are as one of the featured discussions! It's my first so bear with me... I'd like to thank the academy and everyone I worked with on this post, without you it wouldn't have been possible... :-O In all seriousness, I appreciate the help. I had to make a quick decision and having people who have been there, done that really helps at crunch time. I'll follow up with the specs on the new toy.
Mike Devenney
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
Do you use Virtualization? It uses your CPU and memory.I use VmWare so i upgraded my machine from 1G to 3G memory. Again are you an embedded developer or not? If so, you need a Serial port or USB-2-Serial converter too.I am developing concurrently on both Windows ( .net ) and Linux.At some time i have 2 Firefox process open with total tabs of over 30 and IE8 over 40 tabs open. Visual Studio 2008 ( and sometimes 2005 ) are open and a VmWare with Ubuntu Linux running inside it with 1024MB of ram assigned to it.From inside Ubuntu i make a remote desktop connection to my windows.All of these running on MS Windows Server 2003 Standard Ed. SP2 box, which is quite stable and i love it.
Behzad
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
Sony Vaio, always, the best laptop ever Besides the amount of memory and processor speed you have been recommended to take, y recommend you to take care about the size of the screen, there is some vaio laptops with a 16-inch screen and with a resolution of 1600x900 pixels, that's my recommendation Good luck! Regards Juan
Saludos!! ____Juan
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
I say see if they'll spring for one of these(fully loaded of course): http://www.dell.com/us/en/business/notebooks/precision-m6500/pd.aspx?refid=precision-m6500&s=bsd&cs=04&~oid=us~en~4~precision-m6500-anav2~~[^] A core i7 Extreme, 16GB DDR3 @1333Mhz and a 1TB RAID should just about handle VS2010
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I'm a .net platform developer currently wondering around a services mesh... With this kind of architecture I easily find myself with 4, 5, 6 Visual Studio's 2008 opened at the same time + one SQL SERVER Management Studio... + several services running on my machine to deliver content do the site... 4Gb is too short for me... 8Gb minimum... Still... for a couple of years I used only one laptop (a powerful ASUS G1S) as my only machine, with a 2nd monitor. Although the machine was very good, it isn't the same thing as having a desktop with 2 big monitor plus one laptop. So my current configuration is a Quad Core with 8Gb, 500Gb disk space and thinking about adding 2 more HD's to try to speed the IO, 1x 22" monitor + 1x 19" monitor. The Laptop is nothing that fancy but also have 4Gb and a cool performance. I have both computers on all the time but use only one keyboard and one mouse to control both. InputDirector is the best free tool around for this (way better than Synergy). At extreme cases where I need a 3rd monitor I use a tool called MaxiVista to extend the desktop PC desktop into the laptop screen... very coll and very very handy! :) Cheers mate! Good luck on your new job! :)
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Think of a suitably large number for memory, double it, specify that as RAM. Repeat for HDD. Long Life Battery. Best Network Card you can specify.
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave
Skip the long battery life - if you want a laptop you can actually develop on then battery should be the least of your worries. Even on the road you'll have someplace to plug it in - and programming on a plane isn't really worth the trouble anyway. Or you can get an airline adapter if you really need to. I've tried working on some burly laptops we bought for developers that wanted a laptop, and I'm much happier sticking to a desktop. For half the price I get much better performance and don't get annoyed waiting for every compile. At half price I can get a burly desktop for home and work, and be more productive. I only use a laptop if I have to be on-site at a client, and even then I usually spend my time RDP'd to a desktop machine. That said, if your company is paying for your system, don't skimp based on price - think of how much you get paid and how many hours the faster machine will save you over it's life, and its pretty easy to make the ROI case for another $500. Also, I'd focus on RAM and CPU - developing code usually isn't that hard drive intensive (unlike video editing or something). Shaving 10 seconds off boot time isn't really that big a deal, unless you are crashing your system all day.
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4gb RAM, 250GB SSD, dual-core CPU
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I second that, just pay very good attention to L2 Cache. Make sure it's 2MB minimum. 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM, should also be a must.
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Skip the long battery life - if you want a laptop you can actually develop on then battery should be the least of your worries. Even on the road you'll have someplace to plug it in - and programming on a plane isn't really worth the trouble anyway. Or you can get an airline adapter if you really need to. I've tried working on some burly laptops we bought for developers that wanted a laptop, and I'm much happier sticking to a desktop. For half the price I get much better performance and don't get annoyed waiting for every compile. At half price I can get a burly desktop for home and work, and be more productive. I only use a laptop if I have to be on-site at a client, and even then I usually spend my time RDP'd to a desktop machine. That said, if your company is paying for your system, don't skimp based on price - think of how much you get paid and how many hours the faster machine will save you over it's life, and its pretty easy to make the ROI case for another $500. Also, I'd focus on RAM and CPU - developing code usually isn't that hard drive intensive (unlike video editing or something). Shaving 10 seconds off boot time isn't really that big a deal, unless you are crashing your system all day.
"unless you're crashing your system all day" He did say ".NET development".
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
My Core2 (not Core2 Duo) 1.8GHz 2GB RAM laptop (a General Dynamics XR-1 GoBook, if you want to look up the specs) isn't fast enough for the VS2008 debugger with C# .NET code -- it misses breakpoints all over the place. The other developers in my group with quad-core desktops have no problems. So.. if you're going to be doing C# .NET debugging under VS2008 on it, get something at least as fast as a quad-core desktop. YMMV of course.
patbob
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
Mike, I have a DELL laptop that up until recently (Ive had it 3 years) was sufficent to serve as bothg a desktop and mobile and it wasn't too small either. The only downside is you will not be using it on a plane as it's too big for the flip down trays unless you are in first class. The DEL XPS M2010 is a big monster but it is big enough and powerfull enough to serve as a mobile and a desktop because it is in essence a portable desktop computer. You really have to try it out to fully appreciate it. So long as you are OK with not being able to work on it in yoru lap then you will find no better mobile computer. I think its the only one with a built in carrying handle. The M2010 is a 17" with detachable (Blutooth) keyboard and mouse that has built-in multimedia aduio/video (I love wattching movies on mine). One additional note; pay for the extar warranty that covers hardware and get 3- years worth. The one problem you may have depending on how much you travel with it (I take mine tow ork every work day) is that the mechanism that latches the keyboard and the bottom half to the monitor portion (The top half) can need repair after alot of use over 2 years or so. If you do decide to get one be sure to share your experience.
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
I'm very satisfied with my work laptop: i7 64-bit (4 cores, hyperthreading), 1.6Ghz 6GB RAM 320GB (non-SDD) Drive 160GB SSD Drive Windows 7 Pro 64 I've had as many as 3 VMs and 3 very large software solutions open (with 2 of them compiling) and half a dozen other apps, and never notice a slow down. (Oh and Winamp playing - gotta have my music at all times) A couple of random thoughts: * A lot of high-end laptops have HDMI and VGA out, so to hook up an additional monitor, you only need the monitor. * Mine isn't a Dell and in my case I don't have this option, but I think if I did, I would definitely get a couple of docking stations (one for home one for work). Right now I have to hook up power, external VGA, and USB and it's a minor annoyance. * If I had to, I'd probably sacrifice 2 GB ram to keep the SSD drive - the uber-fast drive makes a real difference with Visual Studio builds - it has to open/read/close thousands of individual files during a build. I put all my virtual hard drive files and source code on the SSD drive, for this reason. (You'll have my SSD when you pry it from my cold, dead laptop!) * Get an external keyboard if you use one at home. Switching between two very different keyboards is a killer. If you do use the laptop keyboard, see if you can find a model with an easy way to disable/enable the touchpad when you get to typing a lot. My old HP laptop had a button right above the touchpad to do this, and it was a godsend while coding. Eric
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I'm moving to a new company and they asked me what kind of machine I want when I get there (this is a first). I've never developed on a laptop and want to be able to bring things on the road with me. I never gave any thought to what kind of horsepower a developer machine needs because I was always told what I would be using and just put up with the performance. Now that I get to pick I'm at a loss. They're a Dell shop and suggested that I build one on Dell.com and send them the link. My only requirement is that I can hook up two monitors. Other than that I want to keep it reasonable for them, so no crazy peripherals like a BluRay burner... Any suggestions/direction greatly appreciated!
Mike Devenney
A lot of laptops have VGA & HDMI - but I have no idea if they can work concurrently..
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