Laptop for development

deconduo

ChRoMe wrote: »

We have over 100 crucial SSDs running happily here for over a year. Also any stories I've heard of failures (well within reasonable rates) have had the drives stop writing, they still read.

YMMV etc.

Yep its mainly the OCZ drives you want to avoid if reliability is important. Intel and Samsung SSDs have very low fail rates, with Corsair and Crucial being quite good as well.

croo

Is there any software that can evaluate the status of an SSD?
I have a couple in my laptop - OZC & Crucial. I have them about a year and have had no issues. I've been using SSD for years now - slowly upgrading as they get cheaper and so far I've had no issues. During the same time I lost a HDD (when I dropped the laptop).

As for the general discussion on the joys of the frugal developers...
I have a i7 thinkpad and love the speed that it compiles & deploys a fairly large open source ERP I've worked on. When I started on the project in 2006 it could take 15 minutes to compile & deploy a new version - today it takes a couple of mins.

As for memory - I went a little crazy a while back and got 32GB - yeah crazy I know, it was an impulse buy
BUT, it's bloody great! I have lots of fully functional VirtualBox VMs to test different environments & builds! Even so I've not come close to running out of memory! Not on linux anyway. Alas I'm mostly working on the dreaded windows at the moment and I have had programs run out of memory!? I'm guessing that while windows 7 is a lot more stable than I remembered windows it must have new MS design limitations that is not allowing it to access all required memory... or maybe just old 32 bit software??

stevenmu

croo wrote: »

I'm guessing that while windows 7 is a lot more stable than I remembered windows it must have new MS design limitations that is not allowing it to access all required memory... or maybe just old 32 bit software??

Yep, IIRC 32-bit Windows will only address 3.5GB of RAM, although I think some editions could address up to 4GB. From Windows 7 (possibly Vista?) 64-bit Windows is the norm, is very stable and will see all your memory.

(64-bit Windows XP worked fine, but driver support was a little slow in coming, especially for more obscure devices)

Trojan

OCZ... *shiver*

Like most threads I read in Development these days, either it inspires me to write a new blog post, or I've already written one that's somewhat relevant

amdsoft: Solid State Drives Thoughts & Recommendations

ChRoMe

stevenmu wrote: »

Yep, IIRC 32-bit Windows will only address 3.5GB of RAM, although I think some editions could address up to 4GB. From Windows 7 (possibly Vista?) 64-bit Windows is the norm, is very stable and will see all your memory.

(64-bit Windows XP worked fine, but driver support was a little slow in coming, especially for more obscure devices)

I think the 4 gig restriction even on 32bit doesn't exist in Win7

awec

irishdude11 wrote: »

Bigger screen size implicitly means higher resolution. I have 1600 x 900 on my 17in which is the standard for 17in laptops. You hardly ever find this resolution on 15in laptops which have 1366 x 768 resolution as standard.

If you want a higher resolution (1920 x 1080) 15in you are looking at buying a gaming laptop which is going to set you back over a grand whereas a1600 x 900 17 can be bought for around €450.

15in are an utter pain in the whole for development once you've got used to 17in. You are always scrolling and resizing panel splitters with 15in because of the lack of space. I'd take a 17in with 4GB RAM and average processor over a 12 GB RAM 15in with an animal of a processor any day of the week!

Not really. 17 inch laptop is a total nightmare, who the hell wants to be carting 17 inches around with them?

You can get full 1080 resolutions in 13 inches now I'm pretty sure. Give me that over a big 17 inch beast any day of the week.

GreenWolfe

ChRoMe wrote: »

I think the 4 gig restriction even on 32bit doesn't exist in Win7

Last time I was running Windows 7 32-bit it was still there, there are PAE hacks out there though. According to Microsoft, it's still 4GB max.

Sparks

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[oldMansGripe]

awec wrote: »

Not really. 17 inch laptop is a total nightmare, who the hell wants to be carting 17 inches around with them?

Is it just me, or are there any other old fogies out there who think it's funny that we started with "portables" (hint; with a big enough forklift, anything is portable), then "luggables" (hint; sell one to Arnold Schwarzenegger and you can legitimately say a customer can lug it around), then "laptops" (you didn't need your knees to work again today, did you?), then "thinbooks", "ultraportables" and netbooks*... and now for some reason in at least a portion of the market, we're climbing our way back up towards luggables again?



*and what the frak happened with netbooks? Eee got it right on the first day with small, light and cheap with great battery life at the expense of not being able to simulate protein folding on the thing; and then every Tom, Dick and Harry started adding heavier and more expensive and more power-hungry stuff to them until what you had wasn't a netbook anymore, and now they're talking of abandoning the form factor alltogether? What a stupid idea in the middle of an economic depression - the perfect time for a netbook and they're chucking them! /headdesk


[/oldMansGripe]
[normalService]

croo

stevenmu wrote: »

Yep, IIRC 32-bit Windows will only address 3.5GB of RAM, although I think some editions could address up to 4GB. From Windows 7 (possibly Vista?) 64-bit Windows is the norm, is very stable and will see all your memory.

(64-bit Windows XP worked fine, but driver support was a little slow in coming, especially for more obscure devices)

Trojan wrote: »

OCZ... *shiver*

Like most threads I read in Development these days, either it inspires me to write a new blog post, or I've already written one that's somewhat relevant

amdsoft: Solid State Drives Thoughts & Recommendations

EarthlyPangaea wrote: »

Last time I was running Windows 7 32-bit it was still there, there are PAE hacks out there though. According to Microsoft, it's still 4GB max.

I'm using 64bit win7 - I can see all the ram when in win7 but some apps are reporting that they are out of memory/resources. There is rarely more than 6-7GB used in windows. Mostly that used when using VM in linux. When I mentioned 32bit I meant that some of the apps might be 32bit!

As for the SSD... One is an OCZ Agility 3! I'd better start being more consistent with my backups. Speedwise I haven't noticed any issues, though these drives are so fast if it did loose a significant % of its performance I probably wouldn't notice.

croo

Sparks wrote: »

are there any other old fogies out there who think it's funny that we started with "portables" (hint; with a big enough forklift, anything is portable), then "luggables" (hint; sell one to Arnold Schwarzenegger and you can legitimately say a customer can lug it around), then "laptops" (you didn't need your knees to work again today, did you?), then "thinbooks", "ultraportables" and netbooks*... and now for some reason in at least a portion of the market, we're climbing our way back up towards luggables again?

... And we spent decades moving away from the mainframe only to return to it under the guise of "the Cloud"!

Sparks wrote: »

*and what the frak happened with netbooks?

Too much BSG for you!

Sparks wrote: »

Eee got it right on the first day with small, light and cheap with great battery life at the expense of not being able to simulate protein folding on the thing;

yeah but after their initial success they shifted toselling only windows versions and so needed more and more oomph!

Sparks wrote: »

and now they're talking of abandoning the form factor alltogether? What a stupid idea in the middle of an economic depression - the perfect time for a netbook and they're chucking them!

I'd guess they're seeing a more return selling tablets!

deconduo

ChRoMe wrote: »

I think the 4 gig restriction even on 32bit doesn't exist in Win7

Nope, the 4GB of RAM is a restriction built into how memory addressing works, 32-bit = 2^32 ~ 4GB. This 4GB is the memory limit for the whole system, so it includes RAM and whatever memory the graphics card has. If you have a 2GB GPU, then you are limited to only 2GB of RAM. There are workarounds if you have a 64-bit CPU (most modern processors are.)

Similarly a 64-bit OS is limited to 2^64, or about 18,000,000 TB of memory. (In practice its much less than this due to practical limitations)

Sparks

croo wrote: »

Too much BSG for you!

./boards.o:
In function `read':
./boards.o(.text+0x9): undefined reference to `Too much BSG'

yeah but after their initial success they shifted toselling only windows versions and so needed more and more oomph!

Daft! Why not just keep selling what created an entire market demographic?

I'd guess they're seeing a more return selling tablets!

[mutter]stupid iPad users and their stupid walled gardens[/mutter]

jimmycrackcorm

Sparks wrote: »

...are you kidding me? What are you planning on doing, running all of seti@home?

Look, I'm writing this on bob, my bug-out box (it's meant to be the machine I carry around with me on any trips abroad and which does all my comms), which is a lenovo S205 ideapad. My work machine is a W500 thinkpad, my home office box is an R61 thinkpad, and none of them is in any way a speed demon, and I code for a living and I have never had code that reached the limits of those machines when working properly. Seriously. Modern machines are <bleep>-off fast. The thing that uses the most cycles on most developer's machines isn't the code they write - it's that big heavy IDE they're so fond of, and the web browser searching through stackoverflow.com for a "how do I do this with that" question

The machines you want to be speed demons are your gaming rigs, and yes, there you should spend like a sailor if you like the latest bells-n-whistles and playing FPS games on massively high resolution and high framerates. For coding, not so much.

When I first began as a software developer I coded C and assembler on an original IBM 8088 running @ 4kHz. Now I can't believe how at times I sit and Wait for visual studio and sometimes eclipse to respond.

I do development day in day out and all those seconds waiting On hardware add up substantially.

Sparks

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

When I first began as a software developer I coded C and assembler on an original IBM 8088 running @ 4kHz. Now I can't believe how at times I sit and Wait for visual studio and sometimes eclipse to respond.

I do development day in day out and all those seconds waiting On hardware add up substantially.

Yup, that's why I don't like IDEs
Seems like no matter how fast we increase the number of cycles these boxes churn through per second, we increase the number we waste use on poorly coded bloated tools and the like even faster.

Me, I'm running linux, with awesome to manage an X11 session, gvim and urxvt (well, I like fancypants fonts) are my most commonly used tools, and I just try to keep everything small and simple (though the web browser always seems to defeat that ).

End result, less crap, faster performance (seriously, try awesome, you'll be ruined on bloatware for a long time afterwards), and I don't need four i7s with 32Gb of RAM just to fire up the editor

youcancallmeal

Just asked this question myself here and was recommended the PCS UltraNote which looks pretty good for the money

Trojan

Sparks wrote: »

and I don't need four i7s with 32Gb of RAM just to fire up the editor

Ah now, let's not get into this one again

BostonB

awec wrote: »

Not really. 17 inch laptop is a total nightmare, who the hell wants to be carting 17 inches around with them?

You can get full 1080 resolutions in 13 inches now I'm pretty sure. Give me that over a big 17 inch beast any day of the week.

That probably depends on your eyesight. I've never liked tiny high res on small screens. I have an old 17" laptop with 1920x1200. Love the space when coding. But its not used for carrying around. Just so i can move it around at home and put it away.

At work I have a dual Xeon, but with 19" 1280 screen and the really miss the hi res of the laptop. With Visual Studio and MS SQL I find you need a bit of horse power, otherwise it all gets sluggish.

ChRoMe

BostonB wrote: »

.

At work I have a dual Xeon, but with 19" 1280 screen and the really miss the hi res of the laptop. With Visual Studio and MS SQL I find you need a bit of horse power, otherwise it all gets sluggish.

You brave brave soul, there is no way I could work on 19" 1280 :eek:

Trojan

Sparks wrote: »

gvim and urxvt (well, I like fancypants fonts)

What fixed width font do you use for code?

BostonB

ChRoMe wrote: »

You brave brave soul, there is no way I could work on 19" 1280 :eek:

Well dual monitors but its a bit of pain alight. Then again when I started out we had 640x480 and even low with 10, 12 and 14" screen as normal. I kinda like the retro feel of 1280.

Tar.Aldarion

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

When I first began as a software developer I coded C and assembler on an original IBM 8088 running @ 4kHz. Now I can't believe how at times I sit and Wait for visual studio and sometimes eclipse to respond.

I do development day in day out and all those seconds waiting On hardware add up substantially.

An ssd > any hardware upgrade. Pretty much no loading even if your computer is crap. I can't go back after getting one. Click eclipse, eclipse opens. That's how it should be.

ChRoMe

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

An ssd > any hardware upgrade. Pretty much no loading even if your computer is crap. I can't go back after getting one. Click eclipse, eclipse opens. That's how it should be.

I got my first SSD a few weeks ago and agree completely like this, I wont use a computer without one now.

[-0-]

I recommend an iPad with a keyboard cover from Logitech.

youcancallmeal

[-0-] wrote: »

I recommend an iPad with a keyboard cover from Logitech.

Why and for what kind of development?

[-0-]

It's great if you're on the go quite a bit. There's a version of Eclipse for the iPad so you can pretty much develop whatever you like.

Tar.Aldarion

Sure I can develop on my phone at this stage :pac:

The Corinthian

boobar wrote: »

I haven't done any programming for many years, I'm in a business analyst/project manager role now but would like to get back to basics with java and SQL and pl/SQL in the coming months.

Anything running at 2 Ghz and with 4 GB RAM will do the trick easily - although what OS it's running will have a baring on the matter, so if it's on Windows 8, you may want to up the specs a little. Either way, you'll be able to pick up something new for under €400 at those sort of specs, easily enough.

If you want something that boots in seconds, or is otherwise super fast or you need to do graphics development, then naturally you'll need far more horsepower, but if you just want a laptop that you can run Java (and presumably Eclipse), and a few different database servers, then that's all you need.

Sparks wrote: »

Is it just me, or are there any other old fogies out there who think it's funny that we started with "portables" (hint; with a big enough forklift, anything is portable), then "luggables" (hint; sell one to Arnold Schwarzenegger and you can legitimately say a customer can lug it around), then "laptops" (you didn't need your knees to work again today, did you?), then "thinbooks", "ultraportables" and netbooks*... and now for some reason in at least a portion of the market, we're climbing our way back up towards luggables again?

Fair point. Personally, I think that sometime in the late 00's laptops as "desktop alternatives" became a 'thing' and having something portable became far less important than having something that had the power and screen size of what we were used to in our desktops.

ChRoMe

[-0-] wrote: »

It's great if you're on the go quite a bit. There's a version of Eclipse for the iPad so you can pretty much develop whatever you like.

I think I just got sick in my mouth a little after reading that.

Creamy Goodness

ChRoMe wrote: »

I think I just got sick in my mouth a little after reading that.

i really hope he was taking the piss, but there are enough crazies out there that it might be just plausible...

ChRoMe

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

i really hope he was taking the piss, but there are enough crazies out there that it might be just plausible...

Indeed, considering my quad core, 8 gig, ssd work machine takes about 30 seconds to build and deploy my code, working on an iPad sounds ****ing horrific.