After talking to one of my friends about purchasing a new computer for his software project, it became quite apparent that developers are in the dark on what to shop for in a new machine. The assumption is to buy the best machine that they can seem to afford. In reality this is throwing money down the rabbit hole. A good development machine only needs three things: processing power, RAM and a decent hard drive. Now to completely blow your mind, the basic Dell Vostro laptop can be more power than most developers will ever need. You don’t need to spend hundreds on upgrades to get it there either.

When looking for a development machine the foremost important feature is the processor it uses. In terms of a processor, do not waste your time with how many cores the processor has or the physical clock speed of the processor. If everyone did that, we would have a development world of Intel Core 2 Duo Extremes and nothing else. The two aspects to focus on is the L2 cache and the bus speed. There is a reason why processors have not broken the 3GHz mark with any regularity. Performance is now coming from enhancements in the front side bus (FSB) and the amount of L2 cache. These two features work in combination to alleviate the inherently slow hard drive, which has always been the slowest part of any modern computer. My recommendation would be to look at a mid range processor. My rule of thumb is keep upgrading the processor until the upgrade ratio is just below ~200MHz/$100.

Excellent, we have picked a processor. Now its onto the other aspects of memory and hard drive space. These two are quite obvious. RAM is the most important for multi tasking. When it comes to development it translates to how large a project file you can have open and not notice any slowdown. The goal here is to be able to store all your large projects on your hard drive and have enough RAM to load one or two of these projects completely into your editor. Take a second and look at the size of the typical projects you work on, multiply that number by 2 and buy that amount of RAM. If you want to splurge on your new machine RAM and HD space are the two areas that you will see the most cost/benefit on your system.

Now to debunk a huge development myth. Graphics cards are not important in software development! Go ahead and buy the base integrated graphics solution like the Intel X3100. You will not see any difference in performance during development. Spending money on the upgraded graphics chip is like throwing your money down a rabbit hole. Visual Studio, Vi, Eclipse, or any other editor you can think of are not any more graphics intensive than Microsoft Word. Spending $150 to upgrade your laptop to a “better” integrated card or a dedicated card will be a waste of money which could have been spent on the above. I am sure there are some out there who will argue that have a integrated graphics card will steal CPU clocks from the CPU and they are technically correct. Just wait a second though, if you save the $150 on the graphics card then throw it into an upgraded processor and you just offset any clock cycles the graphics card would have utilized. On top of it all, when you go to resell your computer you will not see a return on your investment in the upgraded video solution as it will be just as out of date as the integrated one.

To conclude the next time your in the market for a new development machine, keep the above in mind and make those smart buying decisions. Spend money where your going to see a benefit and save it everywhere else. Any investor will tell you the same thing in the business world, why not apply this toward everything you purchase?