Windows 2000 pro Developer spec.

Evil Phil

I know this has been asked before but what do you consider to be the minimum spec for a w2k developers machine?

I mean something that will have 2 or 3 development environments plus email client, web browser, command prompt, dev tools (OLE View for e.g.) open at the same time. And probably Word or some other word processor and occasional online help. Java Docs/Msdn library/Help files.

Personally I'd reckon something like Pentium III 750 mHz, 256 mg RAM and at least a 10gb IDE hard drive running at 7200 rmp. If you can give me reasons with examples that would be a great help. I'm trying to build up an water tight case for the investment of £50 of company money (yes, 50!)

kayos

Well I work on the following spec PC

Dual PIII 450
256MB Ram
10 Gig SCSI HD
All SCSI inside
Matorx Millium G400 video card (handy dual monitor has two vga outs)
Nice 17" Trinitron Monitor

and thats due to be upgraded soon.

Main things to look for

RAM
What I would say is get all the ram you can either 512/1Gig as this helps alot when you have a load of things compiling/open/in debug

Dual CPU
This realy realy helps out bascilly your PC doesn't hang when your compiling a project so you can still go off and do things.

SCSI HD
Fast HD makes life painless sorry I mean waitless Also I am always running out of space (mainly cause I work with along of DBs) so I would go for a 20 Gig Drive.

Video Card & Monitor
Its your health at risk here so make sure you get a good qualty card and monitor that support a high refresh rate and a high res (I run 1600x1200 @ 85Hz) To argue this point just say spend some money now on a decent video card and monitor or pay me later when I get really realy bad eye sight and migrains all the time

I'm happy with what I have but my wish list would be Dual 1Gig CPU's 1 Gig Ram and 20 GigHD and 19" Monitor.

bonkey

Originally posted by Evil Phil
I know this has been asked before but what do you consider to be the minimum spec for a w2k developers machine?

I mean something that will have 2 or 3 development environments plus email client, web browser, command prompt, dev tools (OLE View for e.g.) open at the same time. And probably Word or some other word processor and occasional online help. Java Docs/Msdn library/Help files.

For 2-3 dev tools, I would be leaning towards a min of 512MB of memory. Its so damn cheap there's no reason to skimp on it. I have 640MB in my machine which often has been known to run MSSQL Server 7.0, Oracle 8i, IBM DB2, Silverstream J2EE Server and some other bits in the background while I go ahead on working with my "little" dev tools.

Personally I'd reckon something like Pentium III 750 mHz, 256 mg RAM and at least a 10gb IDE hard drive running at 7200 rmp. If you can give me reasons with examples that would be a great help. I'm trying to build up an water tight case for the investment of £50 of company money (yes, 50!)

The processor isnt a huge issue, TBH. It depends a lot on what type of development you're doing...I need processor power for Silverstream deployment (slllloooowwwww), but for almost everything else, I could get away with a much slower machine.

The one major thing to watch out for is the P4 chip and java. It is incompatible with the JIT which came with wintel releases of sun's jdk up to 1.2.1_008 I think. Unfortunately, I have had a number of apps which *when installing* have tried running java scripts against the JRE which comes on the installation CD. End result....kaboom.

Oh - as for disk....forget 10GB. 20Gb minimum, preferably 40Gb. That way, you can copy the entire contents of MSDN or Sun's reference CDs or whatever you like with impunity, as well as having all your help options fully locally available. No CDs for me.

A quick check reveals that in the 5 months I've been in my new job, I've filled 18.7 Gb with "useful" stuff. You mileage may vary.

jc

bonkey

Originally posted by kayos
Its your health at risk here so make sure you get a good qualty card and monitor that support a high refresh rate and a high res (I run 1600x1200 @ 85Hz) To argue this point just say spend some money now on a decent video card and monitor or pay me later when I get really realy bad eye sight and migrains all the time

Any employer with half a clue would laugh that excuse away.
As long as they supply you with an eyetest every two years, and an anti-glare screen on demand, then they are covered. If you choose to run your monitor at an unhealthy refresh/res, they are not responsible.

Pity though...if they were, I could retire

However, I recall seeing charts on teh web about increases in productivity based on resolution & monitor size.

Come up with a reason as to why you need to run in 1600x1200 resolution, then argue the case that your productivity at this resolution would increase according to these accepted charts, if you had a SuperWidgetGFXKard and a UltraKoolMassiveMonitor.

jc

Hobbes

What I would say is get all the ram you can either 512/1Gig as this helps alot when you have a load of things compiling/open/in debug

Yep. Ram makes a massive difference.

This realy realy helps out bascilly your PC doesn't hang when your compiling a project so you can still go off and do things.

Dual CPU's are a waste of money. If your PC is hanging when it's compiling then you have serious problems with your machine.

20 Gig Drive.

I'd go for 40gb. SCSI HD means you have to get a SCSI card which means more heat. Although you should get some kind of backup device. I'd recommend a 40GB DAT tape drive.

Its your health at risk here so make sure you get a good qualty card and monitor that support a high refresh rate and a high res (I run 1600x1200 @ 85Hz)

You don't need it that high refresh. For example I'm running in 1280x1024x32 @ 60Hz and there is no flicker. Monitor I got was an average one (Compaq 17')

Evil Phil

Al the vikings sing: RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM

Yeah, memory's the way to go. Gonna have problems getting it though. I've 256 at home and am about to double it, gotta get a zip drive as well for backups. I can't afford SCSI right now.

It's a shame when you've got a better pc at home, from your salary, then you've got in work.

Trojan

I disagree Hobbes, compilation can be seriously CPU intensive, so if you've got a 2-way system setup correctly then you'll see a big performance difference in UI reaction while compiling in the background.

Kealan, how about a field test: take out one cpu, put it in an envelope, post it to me, and then see what your performance is like in foreground tasks while compiling.

Or something.

[ot] This whole errorcom thing is great fun altogether

Al.

kayos

Not a hope on that one AL

But Hobbes on my old PC in work compiling our software (over 250 VB Projects on the Business layer and about another 50 on the arch layer) it kills you PC on a single CPU and I also run a SQL Server on my machine and OLAP/DTS both of which can eat you CPU and if you only have one you suffer the wait of things to finish before you can even open IE. RAM Helps alot in getting rid of this problem but a proper dual system will leave you free to do things while one CPU is have the crap beat out of it

As for running at 60Hz Vs 85Hz I find a huge difference on my old monitor it would only go up to 75Hz at 1600x1200 and I could not work with it I found I was getting headaches every day but once I moved up to 85Hz (thanks to a new monitor I robbed of a unsuspecting Grad ) I moved my res back up and all was perfect.

ButcherOfNog

for dev pc's, i normally order in equipment just below the cutting edge, so at the moment i'd recommend

P4 1.7ghz, 512M RIMM, 40GB HD. Monitor would be decent quality 17". If a dual was needed, then a Dual P3 1ghz, 1GB Ram.

As for building releases ... get a separate server for it, no need for that to be done on developers pcs, that have had god only knows what installed on them