What laptop for dev with VS [closed]

Question

Im looking to spend upto £500 on a laptop in the next few days, and am now after a bit of adivce. This laptop will be used to develop personal projects on using VS2010, and SQL sever express.

I know this sort of question has been asked plenty before however Im looking for specifics,

has anyone bought a laptop recently to run VS on and if so what did you get?
has anyone seen any good deals on laptops that fit in my price range?

Any suggestions apprieciated Thanks

Answer 1

In my observations, there are two things that slow down Visual Studio on a box. #1 is having too many files open, sucking up all your RAM. #2 is loading files off the hard drive in order to compile. In a small project this isn't a big deal, but as the project grows you'll find yourself loading more and more files to compile.

As a result, the biggest things I look for in a development machine is RAM, Disk speed, and then CPU. Some may say that RAM and Disk speed can be the other order, though that isn't my experience with VS.

I'd say look for a laptop with at least 4gb of RAM, then for as fast a hard drive as possible. Preferably a solid-state drive, but that may not be in your budget. Depending on what you're working on, lots of disk space may easily be offset by the speed of the drive. Remember, you can always delete a project and then check it out from source control again later (you are using source control, right?). From there any of the Intel Core 2 chips over ~1.8ghz should give you fairly good CPU performance.

Answer 2

• Win7 64bit Home Premium or better.
• At least 4gig of ram
• The biggest hard drive you can get.
• The fastest cpu you can get. Dual core or better. Stay away from the Celeron(Intel) and Sempron(AMD) as they are good budget CPUs but do not have a ton of power behind them.
• If you are planning on working on any type of game, then a dedicated gfx card. If not then I dont think that matters all that much. I suggest this because shard gfx get a little sluggish at times.

The rest is pretty much up to you on what you want. I have been watching the laptop sales/deals online and local stores. You can get a nice machine if you are willing to shop around a bit.

http://www.gotapex.com/ (Tends to be U.S. only) will post some good deals but the really good deals go fast. For example the Microsoft store just had 40% laptop coupons that sold out in no time.

To be honest pretty much any laptop(non-netbook) made within the last year or two should work be able to run VS2010 ok.

Answer 3

I think that more or less all Laptops near that budget will allow you to develop personal projects with VS. I give you only three suggestions. Look for:

• RAM > 2GB
• Dual-core CPU > 2Ghz
• HDD > 160 GB

e.g Acer Aspire 570 with i3 330M