I'm trying to figure out the best lower-budget home office development hardware setup. My laptop is aging.
My latest idea is that I would like a very powerful desktop paired with a less-powerful laptop. The idea being that the desktop would do the heavy lifting while the laptop would allow me to work untethered (but within range of the wireless network, of course.)
Is such a thing possible, or am I dreaming?
(I develop .Net applications - mostly Asp.Net)
Thanks for ideas!
You can do that with an RDP / Terminal Services client or VNC. You could also run multiple virtual machines on the beefy server (making it look like a poor man's datacentre / set of less powerful servers).
Another benefit is that you can do some testing with the laptop as the browser client and the desktop as server - this can sometimes show up issues that you won't see with testing on localhost (especially if your network goes down in the middle of it).
Yep, this makes sense and this will work. It's a similar model (but not the same) that's been used for unix workstations in the past (X window).
This is exactly how my current setup is, and it works nicely. I'd still get a couple of 20"+ monitors, as the laptop can be a little restricting for long usage.
I would keep your aging laptop to use for testing thin client apps - who cares if it's aging how much power does it need to run Internet Explorer?
My dream development system at this moment in time would look something like this:
Of course, I don't have any of this at home, I have an aging laptop just like you. I have part of this setup on my desk at work and I keep drooling over the other bits and pieces.
You can use the desktop as some kind of a server and let both your desktop and your laptop compile.
It's like they render 3D CGI movies in studios, across a farm of computers.