Best Laptop keeping Visual Studio in mind

Question

I loved this post by ScottGu which made me think a bit about Hard drive speeds and how it is linked to Visual Studio performance. Since it is a bit older post, I would like to hear from you (serious programmers) if you bought any laptop recently with the same ideas.

Is it worth using Solid State drives? Should I go for 64-bit?

I am a heavy user of Visual Studio and my old Latitude started giving me a hard time. If you have any recommendation, it will help me a lot.

PS: Since it is more of a hardware related question and if it is not appropriate here, feel free to leave a comment. I will gladly delete the post.

I just want to hear first hand experience if you have any.

Answer 1

Solid state not worth it, but 7200 RPM makes a huge difference.

At least 2 gigs of RAM and a decent CPU (preferably dual-core.)

Pick one with a screen resolution/size that suits you.

That's it.

Answer 2

Solid State is getting there... 64GB SSD for $200, 128GB SSD for $500. Personally, I love my SSD, and it kicks serious ass. People are always blown away by how fast it does everything.

Answer 3

Kind of depends on the OS.

But usually, 7200 rpm drives are more bang for the buck.
The ram should be throttled to the os's level, xp seems to run good at 2 gig, vista seems to run good at 4. Running vs and a few other things, my vista box hums at 1.4 gig constantly.

Also get the biggest battery, even 2 if possible, I have a 9-cell and its decent life, but it would take more than one to fly cross country.

As many cores as they'll cram in. I have a desktop with a core2Quad, its sweet for running vs, compiles in no time flat. And doesn't flinch at running iis7 and sqlserver locally.

Answer 4

I have always used a Dell Precision Mobile Workstation (my current one is M65). I think above that, its diminishing returns.

Answer 5

UPDATE

Times have changed and I can't leave answer as it is. I'm going to suggest that people now go buy themselves a SSD. Write problems have mostly been solved, prices have come down and affordable storage capacity has gone up.

Forget SSD, they're slower than you think and have very little capacity.

Instead consider a VelociRaptor IDE drive from Western Digital ($179.99 for 150 GB or $289.99 for 300GB at NewEgg). It's the fastest IDE hard drive known to man right now and has up to a 300 GB capacity. Buy a laptop with eSata (or get a card for it) and you'll experience speeds you've never dreamed of on a laptop (eSata can sport up to 3 Gbps).

This implies that you use it with an external hard drive enclosure, but odds are you'll need one anyways for the SSD (unless you get it installed in a new laptop which costs a LOT of money).

Consider the following HDTach benchmarks from an external Raptor (10,000 RPM/120GB): http://bp3.blogger.com/%5Fx%5FKlQTLtnfI/R8RqCdiA4sI/AAAAAAAAAX0/PikIVAfrHuE/s1600-h/raptor+esata+speed+test.PNG

VS an internal MacBook Pro Harddrive (5400RPM 120GB): http://bp3.blogger.com/%5Fx%5FKlQTLtnfI/R8Rp6diA4rI/AAAAAAAAAXs/lC-WfGlToIg/s1600-h/MacBook+pro+internal+hdd+speed+test.PNG

And the VelociRaptor is even FASTER than the Raptor! If you still need more convincing as to which is a better idea, Maximum PC did a SSD vs. VelociRaptor not too long ago and the VelociRaptor slapped around the SSD like it owed the VelociRaptor money.

Answer 6

Just get a MacBook Pro =)

I'm serious, it is the best hardware I have ever used. Mine is two years old and feels exactly like the day I got it.

And this has nothing to do with Mac OS X, you can wipe it clean and install Windows Vista.

PC World: MacBook Pro: The fastest Windows Vista laptop

I haven't used solid state drives, I can't comment on that.

Answer 7

Personally I would go for a 64bit OS and as much ram as you can cram into the thing. I recently switched from 32bit to 64bit with 4gb ram on a dell xps and the stability is fantastic particularly when running visual studio, sql server 2005 and virtual machines all at the same time.

SSD is nice, but if you get a 64gb drive then pretty much the only thing you'll want installed on it is Visual Studio

Answer 8

I live in Visual Studio and use virtual machines heavily. I can't recommend fast enough drives and more ram.

I'm currently using a laptop with a 200 gb 7200 rpm drive. It came with 2GB ram and a 32 bit OS. I've upgraded the Ram to 4gb, and I'm waiting for a lull to install a 64 bit OS (to take advantage of the full 4gb ram, of course)

Just be sure to buy the ram after the laptop. Buying a ram upgrade from your local electronics store will be WAY cheaper that paying for it as a factory installed option.

Answer 9

UPDATE : I am using Lenovo 17" ThinkPad W701 , it has amazing power and you can work on it as if it is a desktop. 17" really helps me code better. Ofcourse you might need to purchase 2 chargers since it is heavy so that I kept one at office and one at home

Answer 10

I'm using an Eee PC which has two solid state drives (SSD) internally, and I can say that for reading large files, the access speeds are pretty fast. However, the big downside is that when there is heavy disk access, especially writing many small files, the whole system can come to a crawl.

Also, keep in mind that not all SSDs are equal, as their flash memory can utilize different types of cells. Single-level cells (SLC) are faster, however, they are more expensive. Multi-level cells (MLC), where each memory cell can be in multiple states (more states than just "on" or "off") are cheaper, but their access speeds are slower. (Although Intel has introduced their MLC-based SSD, which I hear is fairly fast.)

The Eee PC I use has a 4GB SLC SSD and a 8GB MLC SSD, and the difference in speed between the two are fairly noticeable.

Unless there is a need for the laptop to be more rugged (as SSDs are more shock-resistant than hard drives) and have a long battery life, a hard disk would probably be more preferable than using a SSD. Considering the compiling and building process can involve many small disk writes, I would guess that a hard disk would be faster.

Answer 11

My experience with laptops and IDE's is that the persistent storage is a bottleneck, as is single core for a developer.

An IDE uses heavily I/O to load and save source ode files. An IDE furthermore is constantly compiling code and updates syntax trees. Therefore, a dual core CPU is a must. For persistent storage, you cannot have the best available. If you are on a budget, get those OCZ Core v3's, they do 155MB/sec read and 100MB/sec write, and are €99. If you want more performance, replace your optical drive with another SSD or get 1-2 Intel X-25M. Once you go SSD, HDD seems like tech we used years ago, such a difference you will notice in usability. Compile&Run never went so fast in your IDE.

When working with VM's a lot, such as Javascript, VMware/Virtual PC, and/or having the habit to keep lotsa tools/programs running, buy the biggest amount of RAM available. Its cheap, and it can only do good. It is not unthinkable that newer IDE's such as the upcoming VS2010 use your graphics card to accelerate graphics and other tasks using the massively parrallel amount of pipelines available in a GPU. It might be quite well that you are using it within a few years as well for development of spcific modules/graphic UI acceleration. So add a decent DX 10 GPU too with about 256MB of ram.

• SSD for I/O (Core v3, Mtron mobi or Intel x-25M)
• Dual core CPU
• 4GB/8GB RAM
• recent 256MB DX10 GPU

My personal experience: SSD's let VS2008 run like a purling baby. Since I have those SSD's, I wonder how it was years back when we used hard disks ;). Very slow windows updates and F5 times where I could get coffe, flirt with the girl at the counter down the hall, taking a dump to see that its 90% done. HDD-> SSD was the best investment I made since years. The Dual core CPU is a nice second, it really helps with snappyness in multitasking and compiling. Also, when a bug of your coding made the compiled app go 100% CPU use, it won't lock up/freeze your system.

Look for my SOF question to see why I need a GPU for development of software (business software, that is) in VS2008.

One sidenote here: I use exclusively Lenovo laptops, since they are the most robust laptops in terms of physical quality. I dropped it a few times, no scratch and its still working after about 5 years. Other benefit is the businessy-look of it: dull, to the point, and matches with all suits/clothing. You dont want to attend a business meeting with a pink/red/blue laptop.

Answer 12

For a combination of price & performance, I bought: Gateway P-7811FX

Pros

• 2.26 Ghz Dual Core CPU
• 7,200 RPM 200GB Hard drive
• 4GB DDR3 Memory
• Windows Vista 64-bit
• 17" monitor
• Full-size keyboard
• Inexpensive (~$1,300), esp. compared to Macbook.

Cons

• No bluetooth
• Slightly heavy
• No fingerprint reader