Its been about 3.5 years for me since I last bought a PC. At the time it was a high end system and I am pretty happy that it lasted this long. In fact, I am hoping to get to 4 years with it. That may sound funny, but I have never gone past 3 years on a development ox before. This one, while not screaming anymore, has done a great job at an original cost of $2200 while many others of mine had really degraded the third year I had them. So this year I am starting to think its time to get a new PC … system is slower, 4 GB is my max RAM, its a dual core (nice but quads are much faster), and the overall specs can be blown away now with the newer systems. Plus, my wife gets a kick butt PC when I retire mine :)
So I’m looking at Dell, Alienware, HP, and building my own again. Probably won’t build my own even though I can spend less money and get a very nice system (done it several times), I love that when something breaks I can have a new part within 24 hours with service plans. My customers don’t want to wait for me, so the time is worth the money. That leaves Dell, HP and Alienware (any others worth looking at???) Quad core seems a must, but then the CPU choice must be made as well as Ghz speed, L2 cache, graphics card, at least 8 GB RAM, 7200 RPM SATA is likely (10,000 is nice, but too costly from what I can see). I’m looking to spend as little as possible of course, less than $2000 would be great and get 3 to 4 years out of it.
Not sure when I’ll pick up a new PC, but it will be sometime in 2009. I am at the beginning of the search cycle now and I’ll post what I find out and decide as I go. In the meantime, I am interested in any suggestions or questions you might have along the way.
So what do you develop with?
