I have old enough laptop. And decided to buy a new one.
Usually I use Chrome, Docker, Datagrip, Intellij, Slack etc..
Now I have only 8gb and it is really few.
I think that MB Pro 2018 (touch-bar) (i7, 16g RAM, 512g ssd) will be enough for my needs.
Or I should take 32g RAM?
Or I should not take MB at all ? (never used it before)
I have a i7/4 cores/8 threads/8GB PC which I still find comfortable to do development in different areas (Web Development/Embedded/Mobile/Qt5 on Virtualbox).
There is one key item that you did not mention which is a huge performance improver: switching from HDD to SSD.
My previous PC with similar caracteristics that broke down had a HDD inside and at some point I got tired of its slowness. I replaced the disk with an SSD and the slowness was gone. I've done the same on many other systems, including old ones (Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10, Linux, Pentium, Core i5, Core i7): all show significant improvements when switching to SSD.
Now when I buy a computer, I change the HDD into a SSD - it is worth the cost when using it professionnaly for development purposes.
The Web applications I develop are pretty "heavy". Of course my portable computer is about half as slow as the web application running on a server with higher clock speed, more memory (usefull for caching, ...). But I could surely tune my local server a bit more.
Of course, RAM will matter when you plan on running multiple virtual "computers" at the same time. I could clearly use more memory when running Android Studio, with one emulated android system running - running a Virtualbox instance with Ubuntu at the same time gets my computer in trouble.
And remember: it is better to choose a computer that allows you to upgrade RAM and disk(s). I always make sure that the computer can host a 2.5" SATA drive and that it is easily accessible.
How much difference does dedicated graphics and HDD speed matter when using virtual machines?
For the last year I have been using a MacBook Pro 15" with the following specs with great success.
Core i7
8 GB RAM
7200 RPM HDD
Dedicated Graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB)
I do a good deal of development in Windows so I use VMware Fusion with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 as guest operating systems. Everything has worked really well.
Well, recently my wife's MacBook died and we got a replacement MacBook Pro 13" with the following specs
Core i7
8 GB RAM
5400 RPM HDD
Integrated graphics (Intel)
Since the processor and RAM are the same I thought I might benefit from the smaller form factor of the 13" MacBook (can use external monitor when at home) and my wife could use the power of the dedicated graphics for video editing and the like.
So that brings me to my question. How much will a slower HDD and non-dedicated graphics card effect my virtual machine performance? I don't play any games so I never thought I made use of the dedicated graphics card. I don't know if it actually helped with the VM or not. What about the Disk Drive speed? Does this play a major factor? I really never noticed any swapping when using VMWare Fusion. Thanks for any insight.
The difference will be negligable. You won't notice the graphics at all, and will barely notice the difference in speed from the hard drive.
Solid state disks are dropping in price all the time, if you do feel like the drive is "slow" down the track you can purchase an SSD and upgrade it yourself fairly easily without voiding your warranty. (OWC sell DIY SSD upgrade kits for example)
Windows XP as base OS. Laptop has 4GB RAM and 2*2.2GHz cores. About 3 year old laptop
Am using Windows7 in VMWare Player. If I allocate more than 1GB of RAM to the Win7 machine in the VMWare player settings it goes so slow, and is continually swapping to disk.
I've turned off all Win7 processor intensive stuff.
http://www.computingunleashed.com/speed-up-windows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html
http://www.computingunleashed.com/list-of-services-in-windows-7-that-can.html
The base OS only reports using aboiut 144MB of RAM to the player. Very weird.
I'm using 2 virtual disks: 20GB SCSI for c:\ and 25GB SCSI for data f:\
Problem: How to tweak Win7 VMware (ie VS2010, Sql2008R2) well on an older laptop. Or use something else?
The problem is that by default vmware player uses file as memory.
Read this for more info & fix
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/46122
If you want to achieve this for all your VMs, you may just add/append following two lines:
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = 100
mainMem.useNamedFile = "false"
... inside the following VMware-wide configuration file:
C:/ProgramData/VMware/VMware Workstation/config.ini (or sometimes settings.ini)
The first line sets the percentage of configured VM memory that should fit into the host memory and the second (as already shown in the prior answer) disables default file-based memory usage.
If you want to apply this to a specific VM only, in order to not alter general VMware configuration, adding the following line to the VM's *.vmx file may be an alternative:
hard-disk.hostBuffer = "disabled"
I am setting up a testing PC to help find a weired bug on a single core computer. None of the PCs in our office have single core any more.
Can I use VMWare to something similar to emulate a single core PC on a multi-core computer?
Can you emulate a 32Bit version of windows with VMWare on a 64bit PC?
Yes for both questions with VMWare.
You can change the number of CPUs (cores) to allocate for each Virtual Machine. If you allocate just one, you'll have your 1-core machine.
You can install a 32-bit operating system on a 64-bit VMWare host.
Yes. Pretty much all the desktop virtualisation apps default to emulating a single-core 32-bit guest machine. (They may be using multiple host cores to do it.)
VMware and VirtualBox allow multiple cores to be configured and 64-bit guests; VirtualPC currently does not.
Is virtual PC practical on a home personal development computer. I do some custom .net programming at home and I was wondering if in terms of performance and overall use, Virtual PC is useful. Do the applications inside Virtual PC session run slower. It will help me with my personal dev machine. Would you recommend any other products?
In my estimation virtual machines are one of the best tools that a developer can have. I have my base dev machine and on it I run VPC for different platforms to test installations and application functionality. For web development I keep VPC;s running each of the major browsers that I support, so I continually test my websites on various browsers. I even still maintain an old VB6 app and I have replicated my old VB6 build environment to a VPC image. Make sure you have lots of RAM. My machine runs with 4GB and that works well for most everything I need. I also have Sourcegear Vault set up for source code management. I have the clients loaded on the various VPC's that I use for development and they all check data in and out from my central SQL Server box. It works great.
It really depends on what your home computer is like. I've used VPC to test different versions of Visual Studio (e.g. to make sure that a solution is VS2005 compatible, and to check out VS2010).
I wouldn't want to use it all the time, but then I am working on a laptop. Given a really meaty multicore home desktop (preferrably with hardware support, of course, and lots of memory) it could be reasonably practical for day-to-day use.
VMWare Player is free and some people find it faster - I haven't used it enough to compare the two properly myself. If you're spend a lot of time "in" the VM, it would probably be worth giving both a proper test-drive.
VPC is a very good choice. I use it to test deployments and for presentation purposes.
If you have a PC with a new Intel chip and at least 2 gigs of RAM it actually works just as fast as a regular PC would :).
I recommend 4 gigs of ram though, they're cheap as hell these days and it really matters.
I've had some success with this; I had to develop some older .NET 1.1 software on Vista, which wasn't supported. I had to run XP in a virtual PC container in order to get the project done.
The biggest issue was available RAM; I'd recommend maxing out your home PC to use as much as it can- this will likely be less than 4GB unless you're running a 64Bit OS. I found that getting an extra gig of ram made life much better. Ram is cheap right now, so I'd start there if it didn't work well enough for me at first.
Yes applications will run slower but the hit isn't as big as you might expect. It is pretty reasonable to do development on a virtual machine. Obviously the performance is relative to how fast your computer is, a mulitcore machine will do nicely.
If you develop driver or core routines, where every mistake can and usually will result in a crash. A VM is the best you can use.
I tried Virtual PC and VMWare. They are both pretty good for such stuff.
Virtual PC should be fast enough, unless your driver or code is really time sensitive. A cross-platform, free alternative to Virtual PC is Virtual box.
If you've got a VirtualPC license already, by all means use it. If not, you might have a look at Sun's VirtualBox. It's Free/Libre and cross-platform. I use it to run windows and linux on mac os x and linux and have been quite happy with it.
You can run your dev tooling natively on your pick of O/S. and use VM's to test on other environments. Get lots of memory if you're going to do this, say 2GB or more - if you haven't already.
AMD chips have some facilities (nested page tables etc.) that improve VM performance. 2nd gen Opterons and some Athlon 64 chips will support this for reasonable money. You can even get brand-name hardware like an HP XW4550 with this sort of chip for fairly reasonable money. I'm not sure to what extent Intel has caught up with this yet.
Assuming your host machine has enough raw power then a virtual machine works fine. I have a 2.5GB ram, 2Ghz duel core work laptop and don't want to install vs2008 for personal development so have a virtual machine for that. I've given it 1 GB of dedicated memory at the moment and it runs great, no problems. If needed I'll up the ram allocation but for now I'm happy.
Hope this helps :-)
I use VirtualBox for all development and find the performance much better than VPC. My machine is about a 2 year old dual core with 4gb ram and performance is not noticeably slower than running natively. The virtual machines are Vista and the host OS is Windows 2008. I would definitely recommend using virtual machines as creating a fresh new machine for a new project is very easy.
I have a toshiba notebook with 2Gig of Ram. I am wondering if its worth to install Virtual box and use it to browse web, do quicken, some small dev work etc.? How would I install Windows OS on virtualbox virtual session? Are there good tutorials out there? Would 2gig of ram be enough to run virtual sessions on notebook computer with following configuration:
2 gig of ram
Intel Pentium 4 cpu
60 gig hdd