Re: 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.
>
Sounds like almost a dream configuration, apart from the small harddisk size.
Read on...

> 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.
>
He sees what you have, compares that to what he knows others have, and
sees you have nothing to complain about because it's already better than
most.

>
> 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'm currently working on a 2 year old Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with no external
screen, Vista Enterprise 32 bit, 3GB RAM.
I've purchased my own external keyboard and Wacom tablet as we only get a
marginally useable laptop keyboard and mouse (not recommended for long
time use due to RSI risk).
That's a 2.2GHz Centrino and a 15" standard gauge TFT screen (so you don't
have to look it up).
160GB harddisk space, but we did get an external 160GB as well for data
storage (which is mostly used to store VMWare images not currently in use,
as we do a lot of things in virtual machines to make switching between
customer configurations easier, seeing as we have customers using things
that can't be installed in parallel on one machine, like different
versions of Oracle, different operating systems, etc.).
Of course running in VMWare makes things slower, essentially I do most of
my work on what amounts to a 1.6GHz single core Pentium with 1.5GB RAM.

Seeing what customers are using (themselves usually development
departments) even this is rather luxurious, most are using sub-2GHz
machines with 2GB RAM or less, widescreen monitors (and dual monitors even
more so) are almost unheard of.

> 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.
>
That's in the Netherlands, but from friends in Germany and the UK I
understand the situation is similar there.

>
> 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.
>
>
Your current systems are already way better than average for developers,
let alone your average end-user.

Get used to working in an environment where the CEOs secretary has a more
powerful machine than you.
In fact more than once I've worked in environments where the hardware
upgrade cycle was as follows:
0) facilities/IT management get new machines
1) managers get the machines freed in 0)
2) their secretaries and staff get the machines freed in 1)
3) functional analysts and architects get the machines freed in 2)
4) technical analysts and architects get the machines freed in 3)
5) devs and tech support get the machines freed in 4)

This cycle is getting more rare nowadays as companies find out it's
cheaper to give everyone the exact same machines than to maintain a
disparate platform with multiple hardware/OS configurations.
Of course that now means that mostly as a dev you get a machine that needs
serious hacking to be useful, as company policy typically doesn't allow
installation of software and the standard software set your new PC is
delivered with doesn't include any development tools whatsoever (typically
it's MS Office and little else).