Reply to: Minimum spec laptop for Visual Studio

[Gentile]

Having used it since the RC version.

It used to be a pig and I often found myself going to back to VS2008 whenever I technically could as was sick of 2010 being sloooooooow and constantly randomly crashing and quitting.

Can honestly say though its now reliable, I work all day every day in 2010 and can't remember the last time it crashed on any of my machines and its performance is pretty much as good as 2008. They have obviously fixed something fundamental over the last 12 months.

Edited - although saying that, I dont use C++ so YMMV.

Yes, the Release Candidate of VS 2010 was a buggy pain, as were the various Beta versions of it. The company I was working with at the time were a Bizspark startup (where you get the software from Microsoft for free, in exchange for letting experienced developers loose on it so they can give the feedback that allows Microsoft to polish the product). We therefore went through every single painful update and patch to the thing. The full version of VS 2010 is excellent, though. Of all the versions in the .Net era, going right the way back to the original version of Visual Studio for .Net back in 2002, I'd say 2008 has been the best version by far. It was just as slick and polished as 2005 (which fixed a lot of bugs from 2003), but with lots of caching and lazy loading going on to make startup and use as smooth as silk.

[Willapp]

Can honestly say though its now reliable, I work all day every day in 2010 and can't remember the last time it crashed on any of my machines and its performance is pretty much as good as 2008. They have obviously fixed something fundamental over the last 12 months.

Edited - although saying that, I dont use C++ so YMMV.

+1 same experience. Again not a C++ developer but have used VS2010 since its release and it certainly seems better these days and I can honestly say I can't remember the last time it crashed or slowed down that badly and this is with a wide variety of solution sizes both windows and web. Resharper used to be the worst culprit for eating RAM and crippling VS but even they seem to have got that (mostly) sorted now.

Any Core i5/7, 4Gb+ RAM machine with a reasonable HDD (at least 7200rpm or SSD) will run VS2010 fine.

[vetran]

smaller screen, big LCD's at home.

[Durbs]

What are you basing that on?

Having used it since the RC version.

It used to be a pig and I often found myself going to back to VS2008 whenever I technically could as was sick of 2010 being sloooooooow and constantly randomly crashing and quitting.

Can honestly say though its now reliable, I work all day every day in 2010 and can't remember the last time it crashed on any of my machines and its performance is pretty much as good as 2008. They have obviously fixed something fundamental over the last 12 months.

Edited - although saying that, I dont use C++ so YMMV.

[VectraMan]

VS2010, now it's matured, is not so much the hungry beast it used to be.

What are you basing that on?

I haven't tried the new one yet, but I haven't seen anything to suggest MS have been fixing the fundamental issues; rather they seem to only focus on adding new .NET and Windows8 functionality. It's the random slowdowns that are the biggest issue. I've had to learn never to right click, because often right clicking tries to bring up the loading intellisense message, which if I cancel then causes it to lock up completely for a minute or two. If you're lucky you get the "Visual Studio is waiting for an internal operation" message. As you can imagine this is kind of annoying when you're trying to get something done.

This is on a fairly sizeable C++ project; you .NETters might not have it so bad.

[Durbs]

My Macbook is a last gen (pre-Sandybridge) Core i5 with 8GB of memory and runs VS2010 just as nicely and quickly as my beefy Core i7 desktop does. It even runs it fine within a VM.

For that reason, the "you must have a desktop performance level laptop" is not true, anything of the spec i've just listed and above will be fine.

Important thing is resolution, I'd get a 15" with a decent res screen and any recent mid-range core i5/7 laptop will be fine performance wise (add an SSD and extra cheap memory and it will fly). VS2010, now it's matured, is not so much the hungry beast it used to be.

[Mehmeh]

I have an Intel i3 2.3ghz Toshiba. It came with 4gb RAM and a 5400rpm harddrive... it ran VS ok.

I upgraded to 8gb RAM and a solid state 128gb harddrive. (RAM + hard disc cost about 150 total).

And now it's awesome... I would advise to do this!

[The Spartan]

I have a HP DV6 Sandybridge i5 with 4GB that runs 2010 Ultimate comfortably though I must admit I only use the test tools but the Coded UI stuff is quite heavy to run and my laptop does fine. Like NLUK said get a decent laptop bag or one that has wheels they're all the rage I see them frequently at the airports when I'm there.

[Scrag Meister]

When I first went contracting in 2007, I bought a Dell XPS M1330 for portability and an XPS M1730 for luggable power.

The 13" was great for keeping with you, but the 17" was, as others have pointed out, a bit of a lump for regular portability, but was great if you needed a desktop replacement on an irregular basis.

[d000hg]

VS2005 or 2008, yes. VS2010 is so slow it needs all the help it can get. 4GB isn't enough.

It was when I tried it 2-3 years ago, but that might have been Express version and perhaps your projects are bigger than mine

Have you tried 2011 or whatever the newest one is yet?

[eek]

Thinking about it the true minimum spec for visual studio is Configure - Apple Store (UK)

And very nice it is to

[northernladuk]

Lugging a laptop around shouldn't be a problem if you get a decent bag for it. The difference between a cheap backpack and a properly designed one will make a world of difference. Still might be a problem for southern shandy drinking jessies though.

[Spacecadet]

If you have good eyes then I can recommend a 15" precision with the top screen res 1900*1200 although i think it's dropped now to 1900*1080.

The screen feels huge, especially when I've been using the client co's crappy laptop all day

Interms of power you'll want at least
dual core @2GHz
4GB ram
SSD

If you have the cash then I recommend going for quad core and as much RAM as you can afford and then run development virtual machines.

[eek]

I did read that dedicated graphics card improved the GUI, but it hasnt in my experience. I can still wait several seconds for it to redraw a form when I swap back having changed one line of code.

I think intel's HD3000 and HD4000 cards resolve the issue with inbuilt video card.

[eek]

You seem to have confused screen resolution for screen size.

For multiple windows you don't need a 17" 1600 x 900 screen but a 1920x1280 screen.

Oh and processor doesn't matter. For speed a decent SSD and a decent anti virus that doesn't incept every file request will do you the world of good.