Worst Developers Machines

Jorgen Andersson

You make it sound like it is a bad thing.

Jorgen Andersson

peterchen wrote:

(I hope you are missing the sarcasm icon)

Make a guess. :rolleyes: On a more serious note, I do believe developers should be forced to regularily test their software on slow machines. But developing on them would be wasting both time and nerves.

List of common misconceptions

fjdiewornncalwe

Only when something actually needs to get done. :)

I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.

Gary Wheeler

My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?

Software Zen: delete this;

Vark111

Psh. None of y'all know what a pathetic dev box is. My current machine is a P4. No core anything duo. 2Gb of Ram. Had to scrape through the reject pile to get that. It has 2 hard drives. Each is 30Gb. I didn't miss a zero in that. A total of 60 Gb HD space. And the only reason I have the second drive is because I found it while I was scrounging for the extra RAM. Is it any wonder I prefer to work from home? (Core i7, 12 Gb RAM, SSD system drive + 500 Gb secondary drive)

Dan Neely

Gary Wheeler wrote:

My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?

Only 2.53 ghz here; and about 2 or 2.5 years left before lifecycle replacement; OTOH my last 2 replacements were about a year prior to when they were due to be lifecycled. The 1st because when my XP install got overly crufty it was old enough there wasn't a company image for it and they discovered that the dell image was responsible for weird performance glitches. The second because when the win7 push came mine was 3 years old and they needed to get the interns newer laptops than they were using at the time; so they picked people with less than a year left who were power users and upgraded us early. OTOH I've been promised an upgrade to 8GB once the next batch of 4gb sodimms are ordered...

3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

Gary Wheeler

I'm afraid you, er, win.

Software Zen: delete this;

Jason Christian

That's ridiculous when for $300 you can get a Core2 Duo with 4GB RAM. The productivity increase would pay for itself with a couple months at most.

asoo

Yeah, Similar specs here, except 2.8GHz Celeron :wtf: CPU. And i've been on a waiting list for a replacement for god knows how long (faulty motherboard, but hey, IT WORRKSSS).

Johann Gerell

Jörgen Andersson wrote:

If developers have bad machines they have a better incentive to make efficient code.

Maybe add that to the List of common misconceptions[^] ... ;P

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russel

R Erasmus

O, that would most certainly be the one I'm currently working on... Intel Core2 CPU, 1.86HGHz with 2GB, Takes bout 10 minutes to completely boot, about a further 5 minutes to warm up. Once its heated up it speeds up to normal, manageable speeds. I like it though... It gives me an excuse to go light up a cigarette and drink some coffee in the morning while it boots up. :-D

"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." << please vote!! >>

asoo

I did read that first as: Result: Happier customers, and better-paid devs slaves.

Anna Jayne Metcalfe

Our "worst" dev machine is a Samung netbook - it takes over an hour to do a full rebuild of our main solution (330kLOC in 29 projects) on it, and (of course) has an absolutely tiny screen. On the plus side the battery life is immense so you can do smaller development tasks on it while travelling without fuss (I was doing exactly that while travelling yesterday, in fact). By comparison my main dev box (a dual core Win2k8 Opteron with 5GB RAM) builds the same code in about 20 minutes and the i7 based laptop (which I've just had to return with a graphics adaptor fault - damn!) in a quite astonishing 9.5 minutes. The Opteron is a good compromise between speed and realism though; it's a nice and easy to expand machine (HP Proliant Server) and I can't see myself replacing it for a while yet.

Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"

Kerrash

We've still got a few WinNT machines in production the people refuse to let go of! :confused: Personally I'm happy with my Quad Core Xeon, With 8GB RAM and a C1060 for GPGPU fun. :-D

Behzad Sedighzadeh

This is the same situation in our office. I think this is not so bad, because you have take into account machines that will run your code may not be as good as yuors.

Behzad

Hardik Varma

First dev machine... Windows XP, Pentium 3 processor @ 800 MHz, 256 MB of RAM.... running two instances of vs2005 and an instance of firefox 2.x (the bloated generation) Your move.

Alexander DiMauro

Albert Bezzina wrote:

Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes.

That is IDENTICAL to the computer I had when I first started here! An old Dell Optiplex GX620. Only, it was running XP, not a server OS. But, still, excruciatingly slow... Fortunately, they upgraded my within a couple of months to a Dell Precision T3500 with Windows 7 x64 a Xeon processor and 4GB RAM. Of course, the old one is still on my desk for me to abuse from time to time...although I haven't turned it on in months.

DarthDana

My work machine: :zzz: Intel Core2 Duo @ 2.54 GHz 4GB Ram 32-bit Vista Enterprize 240GB Hard Drive My Home Machine: :cool: AMD PhenomII X6 6-core CPU @ 3.0GHz 8GB 1600MHz Ram 64-bit Win7 Ultimate 5.5TB Hard Drives (1.5+2+2) Ding Ding Ding Ding - I win! ;P I guess I take this stuff more seriously than my boss (US Gov't) does.

Edgar Prieto

Where I work we have custom OS version of Windows (higher levels of security and secret stuff too) so boot up time on my lap is a range from 10 to 20 minutes (vista usually boots from 20 to 40 min ) (Dell e6400 Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz 4GB Ram) so dont come to me with long boot times

Edgar Prieto Software Engineer

Br Bill

I maintain a networked system for a large independent video store. It's all built with 8088 machines that use Lantastic cards. Yeah. Runs on DOS 6.2. The video rental business is dying and the owner has no interest in upgrading. He wants to ride this system until it dies or the store dies. I had to replace one of the 3 machines in the network a year ago and was pulling my hair out, until I found a local guy who had a boatload of working Pentium II's in his garage. I bought two of them. Had to pick ones that still had an ISA bus. Not too many Pentium II machines have ISA buses. I pulled the Lantastic card out of the broken 8088 and stuck it in one of the Pentium II machines, did a bunch of upper memory address exclusion with EMM386, and things are back in business. Total hardware cost, including new (used) hard drive that is much larger than a DOS machine can see: $45. So: Pentium II, 1 MB, LANtastic, Dos 6.2. That's my worst machine. And I had to do some development on it for a quick custom app for this store, but I was able to do it in QBasic. So it qualifies. It is so weird when that store calls me for more support. I have to dig down deep into my brain, thinking in early 1990s ways, to support them.