Minimum spec laptop for Visual Studio

[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!

[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.

[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]

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.

[vetran]

smaller screen, big LCD's at home.

[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.

[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.