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My Super-Fast New PC

Posted At : May 27, 2008 6:05 AM | Posted By : Bob Silverberg
Related Categories: Hardware, Vista

I finally purchased a new desktop for my office a couple of weeks ago. I bought an HP Pavilion Elite Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66GHz. It came with Vista, and looked like it would be a big hassle to attempt to downgrade to XP, so I'm currently stuck with Vista. I've already uncovered a couple of tricks to make Vista less of a pain in the a$!, which I'll try to blog about soon.

Even with Vista this bad boy is very, very fast. I can run Firefox, Norton 360, ColdFusion 8.01 (64-bit), MySQL, Apache, Eclipse and Excel all at the same time, and it's still lightning fast. I find it hard to believe that one can purchase a PC that is this powerful, from a big name manufacturer, for just $1200.

If anyone reading this is thinking about upgrading their machine, I encourage you to do so. Developing is so much more enjoyable now that I don't have to wait for things to happen. If you consider the amount of time you lose and the amount of aggravation you endure while waiting for your machine to respond, and then you consider the number of hours that you'll spend in front of your machine for the next 2 - 3 years, it's not difficult to cost-justify.

I was very tempted to just buy a MBP so I could be one of the cool guys, but I don't actually need a laptop most of the time (being only a part-time developer who works from home), so this seemed like a more logical option.

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Bob, that is awesome. New machines are fun. By the way, you'll find that you have only begun to tap the potential of that box with that list of apps. On my Quad (Q6600 with 4gb) I can run 3 Windows XP VMs, an Ubuntu VM, CF, Apache and Eclipse and still run Firefox like nothing else is going on. These things are amazingly powerful.
# Posted By Jason Dean | 5/27/08 7:01 AM
Thanks for the heads up, Jason. I've been meaning to get some VMs up, but haven't found the time. How did you set up the XP VMs? Did you download a VM from somewhere, or create it yourself?
# Posted By Bob | 5/27/08 9:53 AM
I recently bought a new Dell Q6600/4GB w/Vista, but have finally switched over 100% to Kubuntu and am not looking back. I can run all my CF development environment in Linux and it works great.
I use VMWare Workstation extensively for all my different development environments. I tried the new VMWare server 2.0 beta, but like workstation much better. You have to pay for it, but it just works well. I run XP, Win2000serv, Ubuntu Serv all within VMs.
If you try a VM, there are free alternatives, but I found that USB support varies, which I needed for my Garmin GPS. You can download preconfigured VMs, but I wouldn't trust any of them and simply install my own OS in the VM. I doubt that you will find preconfigured XP VMs, though, due to licensing issues.
# Posted By Terry Schmitt | 6/13/08 8:35 AM
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