Optimal RIA development hardware

No matter how much we spend on new hardware, progress bars, spinning timers, system freezes and occasionally crashes are a familiar site when developing RIAs. My Macbook Pro seems to be fast approaching the end of it's life and I've started to think about a new machine.

So I thought rather than spend forever looking up hardware specs, recommended platforms and whatever, I'd just do the lazy thing and put it out there to the #lazyweb and see what came up.

Within moments the ever-helpful seantheflexguy responded with his spec and his endorsement of his setup:

Well, that was very useful and I thought how great it would be if we could collate more information about other RIA developers' setups and how they rate them.

So feel free to contribute and copy the following into the comments and fill it in and you can help do my research for me share hardware spec for the benefit of the RIA community :D.

Computer:

Processor:

RAM:

Hard Disk Size:

Hard Disk Speed:

Primary Software Used:

Rating: / 10

Other Comments:

Here's mine for starters:

Computer: Macbook Pro 17"

Processor: 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo

RAM: 4Gb

Hard Disk Size: 150Gb

Hard Disk Speed: 5600rpm (i think)

Primary RIA development Software Used: Flex Builder, Visual Studio 2008 (under VMWare Fusion), Sql Server 2008

Rating: 7 / 10

Other Comments: The machine has been a real workhorse for the past 2 years and has taken quite a bit of torment from me. The hardware has been fairly robust although the problems are starting to present themselves now (now i'm out of warranty!) and things are very costly to put right. Runs very hot when running FlexBuilder in OSX and VS in windows and has really started to slow down lately. Never had much of a problem with system crashes or freezing other than the occasional browser fail.