Developer pc
Posted on May 15, 2011
Its been two years since my last blog post. I havent died, but even though im still breathing, its been a coupple of busy years. Another kid, a new house etc have taken all my time. But things are looking brighter and im starting to get more tech focused again.
Thia blog post is about my thoughts on getting some new hw. I think i already decided, but i need some arguments to make sure that the decission i mad with my heart also is the right one for my needs.
For the last coupple of years, i’ve been running on mo or less the same hardware. I got a Dell studio XPS 13 a fw year ago. It was equipped with a core 2 dual processor – state of the art at the moment, a decent graphics adapter 4 gigs of mem and 500 gigs of harddrive. It has been upgraded to 8 gb ram to support multiple vm machines and in two steps upggraded, first to a 256 ocz ssd drive and recently to a 600 gb Intel Ssd drive. I even upgraded the battery making the machine run for 5 hrs on a charge. But now it is dying… Its freshly reinstalled and still freezes quite often. It even complains during bios load once in a while. So now its time to look for something new.
My needs is a state of the art machine for running windows and multiple dev machines on vm ware. I do lots of development in visual studio.
Im quite into apple gear. I just got my ipad 2 and im loving it. I, of course, have an iPhone and all my digital assets (pics and music) is storred on a mac mini. So my first thought is to get a mac book pro and run windows on it, either natively or using parallels. But wow it is expensive. And it has a few caveats. First, i like to get a 13 inch machine as i do a lot of travelling. But i cant get the 13 inch with a i7 quad core processor, which i would very much like since im doing all my develpment using vm ware machines. The 15″ machine would do it, but it is still to bulky and its very expensive.
My criterias are as follows
Intel core i7 quad processor
8 gb of ram and i will not complain if its possible to upgrade to more.
Hd isn’t important as i will move the new 600 gb ssd disk into the new machine anyway.
I prefer a 13 inch because i do lots of commuting (currently 3 hrs pr. day), but a slim 15 inch will do it as well.
I need a a high resolution on the screen as well. My isight is brilliant and i dont mind if my fonts are small as long as there is lots of pixels to use.
I dont care about dvd drive. I dont use it at all.
Ive been looking around using google, and its really hard to find any matches. I’ve been Looking at Lenovo machines, but it looks like a german tank. The Sony Vaio might be a match but have no idea of the build quality. Samsung series 9 is good looking but i cant change the hdd to my ssd.
So what should i do. Pay dkk 20.000 + for an Apple 15 inch of half the price for a new Dell XPS 15 which meets all my requirements except it seems a little bulky? I really dont mind paying the price as this is a tool that is going to be used every day for the next years. So 10k or 20k… Its down to dkk 27 pr day for the most expensive machine… And thats like the first two minutes of payed work every day…shouldn’t i just accepting that i work for two minutes to have the tool i really want?
If i were a carpenter, i wouldn’t buy the cheapest nails that bend every time the hammer fall.
Note. This blog post is written on my ipad… I excuse all the typos.