A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#2I purposefully use an outdated (3-5 years off the top of the line) machine to ensure my web applications run well on anybody using a similarly outdated configuration. I've considered upgrading and using a VM to emulate this, but I'm not quite sure it'd have the same effect. I've found that what I have is "good enough" to work on, but "not good enough" to run overly demanding javascript and DOM riddled pages without noticing.
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#3"Will I ever outgrow my speed demon of a computer? At this point it's hard for me to see how. Even at my peak usage, my processor never goes above 10 percent capacity, and most of the time I'm using just 1 or 2 percent. I'm confident this rig will last me at least five years, and probably more."
The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced.
It would be nice to know how much ram he had in the new vs old machine. I bet the SSD + more RAM was probably where most of the performance gain came from. He might have seen similar performance gain by just upgrading those two components.
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#4I purposefully use an outdated (3-5 years off the top of the line) machine to ensure my web applications run well on anybody using a similarly outdated configuration. I've considered upgrading and using a VM to emulate this, but I'm not quite sure it'd have the same effect. I've found that what I have is "good enough" to work on, but "not good enough" to run overly demanding javascript and DOM riddled pages without n…
Actually, you will have a more accurate effect because most web servers are VMs. Also, the ability to do snapshots/rollbacks/clones should not be underestimated. Upgrading from a dell E630 (T8100 2GB) to an E6410 (i7 8GB) and buying a technet subscription has doubled my productivity as a web developer (not an exaggeration).
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#5I purposefully use an outdated (3-5 years off the top of the line) machine to ensure my web applications run well on anybody using a similarly outdated configuration. I've considered upgrading and using a VM to emulate this, but I'm not quite sure it'd have the same effect. I've found that what I have is "good enough" to work on, but "not good enough" to run overly demanding javascript and DOM riddled pages without n…
Actually, you will have a more accurate effect because most web servers are VMs. Also, the ability to do snapshots/rollbacks/clones should not be underestimated. Upgrading from a dell E630 (T8100 2GB) to an E6410 (i7 8GB) and buying a technet subscription has doubled my productivity as a web developer (not an exaggeration).
He ment that the customer who uses his web page has an outdated computer.
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#6Processor is hardly worth paying for top of the line.
I bought the new 15" MBP that was released this year with 2.4Ghz i5, and put 8GB plus an Intel X-25 SSD in there. Compared to my 2009 MBP w/ 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB and HDD, it's a bigger speed difference than I've ever gotten in any upgrade ever. Definitely worth paying 40x for the drive space.
It's not that the top speed is faster... it's just that the beach ball is gone. It's always responsive. I can be running test suites for a couple Rails apps, watching an HD movie, and browser testing IE6/7/8 in 3 Parallels VMs and it's always snappy. I'm totally spoiled for computers with the OS on an HD. Using my wife's new MacBook for 30 seconds starts to make my blood pressure rise.
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#7I purposefully use an outdated (3-5 years off the top of the line) machine to ensure my web applications run well on anybody using a similarly outdated configuration. I've considered upgrading and using a VM to emulate this, but I'm not quite sure it'd have the same effect. I've found that what I have is "good enough" to work on, but "not good enough" to run overly demanding javascript and DOM riddled pages without n…
Actually, you will have a more accurate effect because most web servers are VMs. Also, the ability to do snapshots/rollbacks/clones should not be underestimated. Upgrading from a dell E630 (T8100 2GB) to an E6410 (i7 8GB) and buying a technet subscription has doubled my productivity as a web developer (not an exaggeration).
How does a much faster computer double your productivity? Other than booting up programs, I'm rarely blocked by my computer being slow. The development I do is mainly text editing with a browser to view results.
I could see this being different if I had to wait for things to compile, though. But still, double is a pretty large claim.
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#8What this guy doesn't realize is that all the extra speed he's enjoying is probably mostly a function of his new computer having a brand new Windows 7 install on it, that hasn't been crufted up by all the various crap that eventually gets installed on it and slows everything down. If he had just reformatted and installed a fresh Windows install on his old machine, he'd be enjoying virtually the same "speed boost."
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#9"But it's probably not the processor that accounts for most of the speed increase I've seen in my machine. The main help, I think, comes from the hard drive."
He's totally right about using an SSD as the boot disk, I can't overstate how much of a difference it makes, more than RAM, CPU or anything else. I've been using one for a while and it made my secondhand 3-4 year old macbook pro go from barely usable for design work to screaming top of the line.
I'm probably going to switch to a hybrid drive soon though, like the 500GB Momentus XT that comes with a 4GB SSD glued on. The big drawbacks of using a pure SSD as a boot disk are that you'll either 1) run out of space on the SSD and/or 2) forced to keep the data on a slower separate drive, assuming that you're going with a moderately priced one and not spending a gazillion dollars for one of the big ones with a lot of capacity. #2 might not matter to the OP because he said he upgraded his rig just for the web browsing, but designers like me routinely load up and work with large files, so I still get the beach ball every time Fireworks tries to open a file or save it. This is where I differ from the OP and the Jeff Atwood article he linked to: I'd rather put all of my data on just as fast a disk as the one with the OS and apps. The slowdown in opening large files is super annoying after you've gotten used to the near instant times for booting the OS and starting up apps.
If I had one of the newer MBPs that came with a SATA interface for the optical drive (instead of IDE like mine), I'd seriously consider splurging and going with Stammy's dual RAID SSD setup:
http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...
Even though I can't use it for RAID, I'm still going to swap out the optical drive for an older IDE-compatible MCE optibay with a generic 500GB drive just for backups with time machine and super duper. That way I can ditch the pocket drive I've been carrying around this whole year and leave it at home for nightly backups.
Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too
#10The same thing happened to me when I bought a new laptop. I realized how terribly slow was my previous one. I also changed my priorities. Now I value bigger ram and CPU performance instead of Graphics performance. Maybe that's because now I have a constantly running VM with linux in background and don't play games anymore.