Which hardware for using Vs.NET 2008/2010 decently ?

Question

(Hope to be non OT) Hi, i'm a little exasperated about running vs.net 2008 on an acer aspire with an intel t2350. I know, this hardware is not the "last" and the best we can find on the market. So i'm thinking to buy a new notebook. For your experience, which type of processor i can buy ? I found, here in italy, acer notebook between 350-500 euros with t4400 and 2-3 gb ram. Is it enough to have a good "working experience" with vs (with good i intend not to wait 10-20 seconds when i switch from asp.net design to asp.net source code) ?

Any answer is appreciated

Answer 1

I think this belongs in SuperUser forum.

Here are the minumum requirements for:

VS 2010

VS 2008:

Computer with a 1.6 GHz or faster processor Visual Studio 2008 can be installed on the following operating systems: Windows Vista® (x86 & x64) - all editions except Starter Edition Windows® XP (x86 & x64) with Service Pack 2 or later - all editions except Starter Edition Windows Server® 2003 (x86 & x64) with Service Pack 1 or later (all editions) Windows Server 2003 R2 (x86 and x64) or later (all editions) 384 MB of RAM or more (768 MB of RAM or more for Windows Vista) 2.2 GB of available hard-disk space 5400 RPM hard drive

Answer 2

If you're developing with less than 4gb and a 64 bit OS you're living in 1996.

64bit, 4gb of memory.

Answer 3

I think it relies in the weight of the solution you're working on. Switching from asp design to source code is really slow. Personally, I had bad experiences and I don not find productive using the design view. I used VS2008 in machines with a really good hardware configuration and this 'switching' still slow, it must be a bug.

In this link you can find the 'official' info that you're looking for.

Also I found that there was an effort to reduce that loading time, but in my opinion, is not enough.

Answer 4

Just about any machine with 2GB of RAM will run the actual Visual Studio editor just fine.

However, development systems rarely stop at just a single editor. You might typically have two or three instances of the editor, plus a web browser or two, a task management system, a web server and a database engine, and maybe an additional VM or two. Not to mention power left over to actually run, debug, and compile the app you're working on.

Because the load here is typically spread over several apps/processes, a development machine can generally make pretty good use of a quad code processor with at least 4GB of RAM.

Answer 5

I find using a Solid State hard drive do alot for the performance. That and 4gb of ram and a decent CPU and you a good to go!