VS2005 IDE Crawls

[Julian]

Hi
I recently installed VS2005 standard edition on my pc which is Athlon 1.4Ghz
processor with 512 Mb of RAM with XP Pro sp2 and although the performance of
VS2003 was acceptable VS2005 takes an age to load and the IDE is so sluggish
to be almost unuseable.

I was considering upgrading the machine anyway and noticed that there are
good deals at the moment on 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 1Gb of ram and wondered if
any one had experience of the difference with VS2005 and P4 compared to a
slower processor dual core machine and generally what specification machines
gives an adequate performance

I basically only use it for winform programs so would normally only have the
IDE and sql server express running.


Julian

 

[Rad [Visual C# MVP]]

Hi
I recently installed VS2005 standard edition on my pc which is Athlon 1.4Ghz
processor with 512 Mb of RAM with XP Pro sp2 and although the performance of
VS2003 was acceptable VS2005 takes an age to load and the IDE is so sluggish
to be almost unuseable.

I was considering upgrading the machine anyway and noticed that there are
good deals at the moment on 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 1Gb of ram and wondered if
any one had experience of the difference with VS2005 and P4 compared to a
slower processor dual core machine and generally what specification machines
gives an adequate performance

I basically only use it for winform programs so would normally only have the
IDE and sql server express running.

Julian

From past experience you'll never get a machine that is as fast as you'd
like it to be Splash out as much as you can afford. I have a dual core
PIV with a GB of RAM and things still get a bit sluggish (but usable) when
I happen to have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Outlook and some
browser windows open.

I think the main problem is the other things that run at the same time
(firewall, antivirus, RSS readers, etc) that all want a piece of that RAM!

 

[RobinS]

I think buying some more memory for your current machine would help. I
run VS with 2GB of ram.

Have you installed SP-1 for VS2005? It's supposed to help.

Robin S.

 

[pvdg42]

Hi
I recently installed VS2005 standard edition on my pc which is Athlon
1.4Ghz processor with 512 Mb of RAM with XP Pro sp2 and although the
performance of VS2003 was acceptable VS2005 takes an age to load and the
IDE is so sluggish to be almost unuseable.

I was considering upgrading the machine anyway and noticed that there are
good deals at the moment on 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 1Gb of ram and wondered
if any one had experience of the difference with VS2005 and P4 compared to
a slower processor dual core machine and generally what specification
machines gives an adequate performance

I basically only use it for winform programs so would normally only have
the IDE and sql server express running.


Julian

I second RobinS' suggestion to get 2 gig of memory. I also,as an AMD user,
suggest that you upgrade to a modern CPU and motherboard as well. That 1.4
is getting pretty long in the tooth. You're going to buy memory anyway, so
I'd recommend that you move up to either an Intel Core 2 Duo or an AMD X2
Socket AM2 outfit. Either upgrade will require that you move to DDR2 RAM.
Get a 2 gig kit.

 

[Julian]

Many thanks for the comments

I had broadly come to the same conclusion. As a matter of interest I found
by keeping on opening copies of VS2005 and running a small program. The
machine appears to run out of memory and beome so slow that you have to wait
for it to update the screen when 6 copies are open.

I had not tried the service pack but had figured more code running would
slow it down more. That has been my experience service packs in the past.

Julian

 

[RobinS]

The service pack addressed some performance issues with Visual Studio,
especially when you have multiple projects in one solution.
So it might help.

Robin S.
-------------------------------

 

[Julian]

Thanks I'll try it

Julian

The service pack addressed some performance issues with Visual Studio,
especially when you have multiple projects in one solution.
So it might help.

Robin S.

 

[RobinS]

Be patient. It will take a while to install. I think it took
about 1/2 hour on my machine, and at some point in the
installation, it looked like it wasn't doing anything, but
it was.

Robin S.
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