Information gathering exercise

Hi!

I am attempting to get my team (all three of us) hardware upgrades for
our development activities. And I need your help.

We are currently running on 2.4GHz Pentium 4 desktops that are maxed
out with 2GB RAM and around 100GB disk (usually made up of a 30GB
system drive and a 70GB data drive). The original systems were 512MB
RAM and a 30GB disk drive. Each desktop has a 22inch and 19inch
monitor attached to it. Our work centres around Java technologies with
some Linux for a complex scientific instrument. Our principle IDE is
IDEA. One of the guys won't use IDEA past version 6 due to lack of
responsiveness. I use release 8 and put up with the sluggishness on my
ancient hardware. But, I have had enough of this self abuse and
bruising of my brain.

How can you help me?

Well it looks as if it is going to be very hard for me to get any
monies for upgrades the way the budget, under the CEO-elect, is
shaping up. Apparently, he had someone visit our offices recently and
that person pronounced our systems as old, but good enough. I never
met this person. No one on my team met this person. So I have no idea
how he gauged our systems suitability for purpose.

Sheesh!

Anyway, back to that helping thing.

I'd like to know what kind of hardware you are developing on. I am
interested in the processor , the RAM and the disk size. If you can
also give me some idea of the principle development task that might be
useful too. I am less interested in the OS you are using. I intend
using this information as data to push my argument for desktop
upgrades.

I will post a summary of responses in around a month's time in case
the information is useful to others.

Finally, I would be grateful if you can tell me your locality. I am
based in Christchurch, New Zealand and I get the feeling that my
CEO-elect might be more responsive to my needs if I can show that
other, local companies, are.

I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for your assistance.

Regards,

Gordon J Milne

p.s. FWIW, my gut feel, given the age of our machines, and how long it
takes for us to replace hardware, was that we should upgrade to quad
core desktops with 4GB RAM that can be grown to 16GB. As for disk, I
was aiming to start with 500GB drives. I am using a very naive metric
for this upgrade but our current CPUs have a passmark
(http://www.cpubenchmark.net) of 322 and I'd like to see us working
with systems having a passmark of 4000 or more.