JoeAudette.com

I got a new machine about a week ago for my main development system and I am so happy with the improved speed. My previous machine had become so slow it was really getting in my way all the time. I had upgraded it to Vista about a year ago and after 8 months it became unusable, so I kind of blamed Vista and I went back to XP. After a clean install of XP it seemed better again for a little while but then I started using Visual Studio 2008. At first it was tolerable then it became worse over time and it was getting very frustrating waiting for it to do whatever its doing in the background all the time before I could do what I need to do. It was just getting in my way and hurting my productivity and attitude. So finally I realized, hey, this machine is 3 years old, I'm a developer, I need a new faster machine, its crazy for me to limp along on this old hardware.

I bought an HP Workstation for about $2,350 plus tax and shipping with no monitor, keyboard or mouse, as I already have that stuff.  So far its so much faster than anything I've used I'm really happy with it. I got 8GB of RAM and 2 10,000RPM drives and a fast Core Duo processor. If I had it to do over I'd probably spend more and get a Quad Core processor, but this machine is plenty fast. It opens large Visual Studio solutions almost instantly, builds are very fast, and development in general is a joy again because I'm not hindered waiting for my machine anymore. I'm running 64 bit Vista Business, obviously 64 bit since you can't address 8GB of ram with a 32 bit version of Windows.

I guess I waited so long because I'm in a self funded startup business and trying to be very frugal, but I think to be succesful I need to be very productive and to be very productive I need to have a responsive machine. It was worth every penny. Development is fun again.