Faster development system recommendation please

[jj3000]

I have a 1.2 Ghz development workstation, 256 MB RAM. W2K 100 GB NTFS
on C:, I guess the many cluster makes the HD access pretty slow.

When trying to add/remove/view components the in target designer tree
takes a long time, especially if my target has more and more
compoenent. when running dependency check my machne slows to a crawl
(takes 15-20 mins) sometimes I swear the internet gets disconnected!
This is the most CPU/HD intensive application I have seen.

I need to submit specs and request a new workstation, I guess the HD
speed is the main concern. I need it to be faster than this POS 2001
computer right now. Please tell me what you recommend? Some kind
of SATA/UIDE 133 RAID? Sorry I havn't been up to date on the CPU
hardware. Most likely this will be some kind of dell workstation
with some aftermarket upgrades if necessary.

 

[Andy Allred [MS]]

You system meets the minimum requirements just to ensure everything works
properly without error. However, as you're finding, the tools can bog down
your system due to the sheer amount of SQL work going on. You will see
significant improvement by increasing the RAM. Once you exceed 512MB it will
get better - the DB itself is 500MB! If you do a lot of work on the
configurations then go ahead and take it to 768M-1GB RAM and it'll fly in
comparison.

RAM is cheap, just upgrade the RAM and you can leave the drives and drive
controllers alone.

Andy

 

[KM]

See this recent thread:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&frame=right&th=b6859a2bd8
7661ee&seekm=%23u0QkIXBEHA.640%40TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl#link1.

Btw, 256M is not much for running XPe tools (especially TD with pretty heavy
Configurations). It makes things even worse if you are running SQL with XPe
DB on the same machine. If you have enough RAM that may not swap the virtual
memory on your HD and you may not need to change the one (however, having
faster HD always helps! ).

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Let us consider.

Virtual memory backed on HDD is the slowest thing in windows.
More memory means less HDD activity.
Enough memory mean that you can disable page file(or at least that page file
wont be used).
So 1GB or better 2 GB of RAM will be enough to cache whole DB in RAM memory.

Consider that accessing page from pagefile HDD takes around 8ms.
And from ram we talk about few nano seconds, this should give you the
picture.

Since RAM is cheap, you should consider buying 2x1GB DDR memory on 400+MHz.
Some motherboard based on Intel 875 chipset with CSA 1GB integrated network
card.
Intel P4 HTT processor 2600+ processor with 800 MHz FSB.

HDD speed is irrelevant for long time works.

So first upgrade your memory. And if you want new computer look at spec I
gave you above.

Regards,
Slobodan

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