[AccessD] Windows can be so much fun

jwcolby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sat Nov 5 09:54:28 CDT 2011


I just replaced my Dell m90 laptop with a $600 Toshiba with an AMD A6-3650 quad core and 6 gigs of 
RAM.  The laptop clocks the cores at around 1.4 g but they can automatically overclock up to about 
2.1 g (I think).  I then run a virtual machine server with a quad core AMD clocked at 3.3 g and each 
VM (there are three main VMs) is given a single core and anywhere from 3 gigs to 6 gigs of ram.

I have a vmDev virtual machine which has 4 gigs and both Paul and I do our development on that 
machine, simultaneously, using remote desktop to get at the vm.  So a single 3.3 g core and 4 gigs 
is adequately supporting two developers.  I can if I want do my dev directly on my laptop, and the 4 
cores are noticeably faster but not enough to make me prefer that to working in vmDev.

 > Unless you are building a server, I think anything over 4 gigs RAM is a huge waste....especially 
if you've got an SSD.

Or a gaming machine.  If you were developing big C# programs then more memory would help.  At the 
price of memory today I think 8 gigs is the new norm for development.

An SSD also makes an enormous difference though.


John W. Colby
Colby Consulting

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it

On 11/5/2011 10:26 AM, Mark Simms wrote:
> There is no question that John's talent for building these high performance
> servers is very valuable.
> However, for most workstations, I think anything beyond a dual core
> processor is a huge waste of CPU Cycles.
> I was at a client site on Friday working with a 3 year old workstation
> running Vista.
> After running a week or so with my poorly tuned AMD "Frankenbuild", even
> that Vista workstation was abjectly S L O W.
> I was shocked ! All of the gaming guys on the forums had been panning MY
> SYSTEM as slow, slow,slow.
> Unless you are building a server, I think anything over 4 gigs RAM is a huge
> waste....especially if you've got an SSD.
>
>> Meanwhile, we pensioners subsist with a mere 4 gigs of RAM and a single
>> duo-core processor. I guess JC's in that 1% we're hearing so much about
>> lately LOL.
>
>



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