I need ideas: building a cheap-but-powerful dev machine…

As part of my New Year’s resolutions, I’ve vowed to tackle a new technical challenge per month; however, to do so, I’d really like to beef up my home development environment, and was hoping to get some suggestions from some people on what to do.  A little background information would probably help, so let me sum up what resources I have (and some other factors influencing my decision):

Resources:

  • My company provides me with a mid-tier (LOW mid-tier) laptop for development.  While I can load some software on it, I’d rather not load my own personal development environment onto it.  I’ve thought about virtual machines, but it’s really incapable of doing much more than it already does (SQL Server Management Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 can barely be opened at the same time).  It’s also a brick; traveling with it is NOT fun, but I have to carry it with me in case I need to securely access our network.
  • I have a desktop PC that was state-of-the-art 4 years ago, running Windows XP.  I’ve loaded Win 7 onto it, and the motherboard doesn’t like it.  I mostly use this PC for some minor development work, balancing my checkbook (Quicken), and browsing the Internet or watching my SageTV recordings.
  • I have a MVP MSDN subscription that I won at SQLSaturday 51 in Nashville; I know a few people were surprised that I won it (because they assumed I already had it), but I’m not an MVP (at least not an officially recognized one; see Paul Randall’s shout-out to @sqlagentman on this post.).  While I can get bits and pieces of this software to work on my home machine, I really think I’d be better off with a new environment.

Factors Influencing My Decision:

  • Budget is top priority; I have limited funds for this project.  I’d like to spend less than $500 upgrading my environment.
  • Mobility.  I do plan on traveling some to make presentations; the question is, how much of my development platform needs to be mobile?   Can I just get a superfast desktop, and do minor road development on my laptop?  On the other hand, I am spending a lot more time on the road between my apartment and the office (and my fiance’s house) these days; should I invest in a laptop, even if means I have to carry two laptops from place to place?

So, there you have it; resources and factors.  I’ve thought through a couple of scenarios, but I’m very open to suggestions:

  1. I could make my home PC a kick-a$$ development platform for under my budget.  Not very mobile, but cheap.  A couple of parts from TigerDirect, and away I go.  I might even have enough scratch left over to invest in an Android tablet or iPad for presenting (yeah, presenting; that’s how I plan to explain it).
  2. I could buy a cheap but beefy laptop and replace my home PC; not as powerful, but probably capable of doing dev work.  It’s mobile when I need it to be, but it does mean I would probably have to carry two laptops when I travel.  I’m worried that it won’t be powerful enough, but the i3 machines are pretty tasty these days.

Please feel free to leave comments with ideas; I’d love to hear some suggestions.  I’d also love to hear suggestions on 64 bit vs 32 bit (I’m assuming 64 bit); how would YOU build a cheap development platform?

Share