My Computer

Due to an unfortunate incident involving an operating system setup procedure and a format operation I lost a great deal of data. Anyway, that’s a story for another day. The end result is that I had to rebuild my main development box and this is what it looks like.

This isn’t one of those “here’s my favorite tools” list. Rather these are the commercial software products that go onto any development computer I prepare.

Here are the basic specs for my computer:

Dell Precision Workstation 380
Intel Pentium D 820
2 GB of RAM
2 x 37 GB hard drives
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285
2 x Dell 1905FP
Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000
Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0

The Dell 380 is a solid desktop. The Pentium D 820 is a great entry-level (read: affordable) dual-core 64-bit processor. Unfortunately it’s not the 920 which supports Intel VT – oh well (read: Ari you ***). The NVIDIA display adapter is not exactly high-end but I love it. It’s a single card supporting dual monitors with a little splitter cable. And those Dell LCD monitors are awesome.

So here’s what gets installed:

Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition
Office 2003
Visual Studio 2005
SQL Server 2005
MSDN Library - May 2006 edition
Windows SDK - Vista beta 2 build
Windows Driver Kit - Vista beta 2 build

I haven’t found working drivers for my video card yet so Windows Server Longhorn will have to wait (I run Vista on a test box). Office 2007 also doesn’t work properly on x64 editions of Windows so that too will have to wait. I’ve also finally ditched Outlook. Unlike Word 2007 which has become considerably faster and simpler, Outlook 2007 remains slow and complex.

How about you? What does your dev box look like?

© 2006 Kenny Kerr

Published Tuesday, May 30, 2006 9:15 PM by KennyKerr

Comments

# re: My Computer

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 3:06 PM by Ari Glaizel
Hi Kenny.. Here is my computer. I may want to upgrade soon since its getting 'old school' quick.

Asus P5WD2 Motherboard (Intel 955 chipset)
Pentium D 920  :) :) :)
2GB RAM
eVGA 7800 GT (NVIDIA)
Maxtor 250 GB SATA HD
ATI TV Wonder
Create Audigy 2 ZS
Microsoft Wireless laser mouse 6000
Antec Sonata case
Dell 20" Widescreen LCD

Applications:

Notepad
calc
mspaint

# re: My Computer

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 9:02 PM by Norman Diamond
> Due to an unfortunate incident involving an
> operating system setup procedure and a format
> operation I lost a great deal of data.

You don't have to be in setup mode or a format operation in order to get that result.

> How about you? What does your dev box look like?

The one that gets most of my development work isn't the most powerful one I use, due to differences in who owns them and who owns my time etc.

Dell 8300
P4 2.60
2 GB of RAM (including 1 GB loaned from me to X)
120 GB + 60 GB hard drives
Nvidia FX 5200
1 x Dell 17 inch[*] screen
Dell keyboard
Dell mouse

[* Inches are used for:
diagonal measurement of computer and TV screens;
some dimension of bicycles;
one dimension of hard drives (2.5 inch x 9.5 mm x ??);
dots per inch in screens, printers, and scanners.]

# re: My Computer

Friday, June 02, 2006 12:53 AM by Mark
What do you use now instead of Outlook?

# re: My Computer

Friday, June 02, 2006 1:31 AM by KennyKerr
Mark: I haven’t settled on anything yet. I use Gmail as the backing for my kennyandkarin.com email aliases which gives me awesome archiving and search capabilities. I’m currently using Outlook Express (OE) as a front end just for checking mail and sending messages (I don’t store anything in OE). OE is way faster than Outlook but is pretty antiquated. So I’m still keeping my eyes open. I just don’t want another big fat mail client and ideally it should support Hotmail’s HTTP client protocol.