Question

I do Visual Studio development on my employer-issued Dell D830 laptop (see specs). Like many developers, I am ashamed to say, I am quite ignorant of hardware. The main thing I noticed in looking at the specs of my current machine is (1) it came out over 2.5 years ago and (2) it has 2 GB of RAM.

I am currently experiencing somewhat slow build times. I often have 3 or 4 Visual Studio instances running (due to having to work on several "solutions" at once) plus SQL Server, the web server, etc.

Is it worth the "capital" I would need to expend to twist my employer's arm to upgrade my laptop? I'm thinking a newer model would have 64-bit Windows and at least 4 GB or RAM and a faster processor, but I don't want to have to go through all that and not see a noticeable difference.

Due to the "contractor" nature of my job and the fact that I work from home sometimes, I need to have a laptop, not a desktop.

Any advice?

Answer 1

maybe not the answer you want to hear, but ... a fresh windows installation often works miracles, especially on a machine being used heavily for 2 years.

with a C2D processor, nVidia Quadro GPU and 7k2 rpm HDD this one should be still up to the challenge.

Answer 2

I work with a number of developers that use D830s every day and they work quite well. We do a fresh install on a regular basis. We have a master image so the user is not "offline" for many hours for the refresh.

I would also suggest that 4GB of RAM would help. However, some D830 systems will only recognize 3.5GB even with 2 2GB SODIMMs installed.

You should be able to use Task Manager and other PerfMon tools to see any bottlenecks. If your RAM in use exceeeds installed, you will have a big performance hit.

We also run Diskeeper on the D830s to keep the drive fragmentation down. I am sure there are other good products or even just a manual deffrag ona regular basis.

One developer has tries XP x64 and not found a big difference on the D830 as 4GB is the limit. A SolidCAD user has XP x64 with 4GB on an HP Mobile Workstation and tests don't show a big improvement over 32bit. The HP can take up to 8GB but we have not tried an upgrade as it seems fine now.

Answer 3

Switched employers... got a brand new laptop... even has Windows 7... problem solved :O