NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

Hi,

> Who here is happy with their current development machine?  Would you
> care to share your hardware specs?

I got a new system last year (wha, this year flew by).  Basically a Dell
desktop with the Q6600 and 8gb RAM.  I had 4gb RAM originally which was
fine, but later upgraded so that I could do more VM stuff (VMs really are
key these days, I'll admit).  I run Windows 2008 Server Workstation, and
soon to be Windows 7 (Win 7 is on my laptop for quite a while and I do think
they really got it right this time).

> I'm looking to upgrade my 7-year old desktop for something with a little
> more snap.  Hopefully under $1000, but it's been ages since I shopped
> prices, so clue me in if I'm naive.

My desktop system did come in under $1000 but I opted for the 22inch
monitors and a dualy video card, which put it at about $1300 at the time
(Dec 2008).

> For context: This is for full-time web app development primarily in PHP,
> running some flavor of Linux.  Essentially no graphic design work at
> all.  Desktop or laptop, I'm indifferent.

So for a long time I used only a laptop for development/everything,
considering that the specs between desktops and laptops were basically
inconsequential.

I must say, though - desktop's today are something special in terms of
power/performance/etc.  And especially monitor real-estate and certainly
price.  What really switched me was that nearly all laptops are widescreen
these days.  I didn't like that and so tested a desktop again for real
development, and frankly haven't looked back.

Just to add - if you get a new laptop, get a SSD - huge difference no matter
what the benchmarks say.

> For the most part I've been fine with my current setup, but I recently
> started using a framework which, for all I can do to it, takes 10 and 15
> seconds to render a page on this machine. I've finally decided just to
> throw hardware at it.  Page-load times are unnoticeable on my rented
> hosting servers, so I can't really blame the framework.  On this
> machine, when I'm loading pages all day trying "this way" or "that
> way", those 15-second page loads add up pretty fast.
> 
> I'd love to hear any advice on what makes a good web developer's
> machine.  At this point I don't have a lot of places to ask, other than
> vendors who'll just sell me as much as they can con me into.

I'd get a nice desktop which is very reasonably priced these days.
Photoshop/AI/etc work very well on these desktops too, unless you're a
professional graphics person, so it serves double purposes.  And with the
monitor real-estate, I'm frankly a bit embarrassed that I used a laptop for
so long :)

I basically use my laptop to remote desktop in when I need to, and for basic
code hacking with Ultraedit on the laptop (Eclipse/etc remain on my desktop
but I can also always development if needed from my laptop).

H