system requirements for Visual Studio 2010

Question

My team is currently using VS2005 with the following development PCs that are a few years old: XP, Pentium D 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM.

My gut tells me that this is going to be poor hardware for VS2010 development. I am not running VS2010 beta but I am running Blend 3 beta and the performance is bad.

Can you point me to anything that I can show my boss to convince him to buy 6 new machines for my team?

Edit below after initial answer from Jon:

I should have added that my boss wants to upgrade current machines with new hard-drives so I am trying to use this opportunity to take a look forward and see if a HD upgrade is really worth it. This HD upgrade would not just be simple installation of 2nd drive but would replace current drive and would involve backup/restore or reinstallation headaches. There would be the added benefit of 64bit development too, something that we have been talking about.

Answer 1

Betas typically are bad in terms of performance. I know that MS is working hard to improve the performance of VS2010.

However, I have the beta running on my Samsung NC-10 netbook, so it does work on low spec machines.

Do you already find yourself frequently waiting for your machine to catch up? If so, that's the reason to give your manager: you'll be more efficient now with a new machine. If not, wait until VS2010 is out and you actually have it installed (will you even upgrade immediately?) - then if it's too slow, you can show that to your manager at that point.

Speculatively requesting an upgrade doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

Answer 2

Given that those Pentium-Ds are dual core processors, I'd suggest:

• maxing out the RAM
• Windows 7 x64
• separate faster HDDs

Those CPUs, while not at the top of the list, are decently powerful. They should handle today's workload of VS2005/2008 without much problems.

It's likely back to the RAM and probably HDD speeds. I know you didn't mention HDD at all, but consider 2 drives (OS and data) an SSD drive instead.

I realize this isn't a direct answer to your question of how to convince your boss to kick out the money, but if that doesn't work, perhaps this will help in terms of getting more performance.

Answer 3

Hello, I also plan to upgrade VS 2010. Currently I am on the market for a new workstation. (moving away from a dell notebook to a proper machine) What would be the best system under $1,500. Should I wait until Windows 7 is released? I am not in a rush - I can wait another month if it would make a difference.

Thanks