In my last post, people commented that I should write about whatever I want. I’ve posted many despairing things in the past little bit – deservidely so given the situation – but I think I’ll try to get back to what I usually do…writing about whatever the hell strikes my fancy at any given moment. I may write more about my mom; stay tuned. For now, though, I’ll mention something dorky. If it ain’t dorky, then it ain’t me 😉
Backup tip: tape sucks, optical is kludgy and RAID5 (or better) isn’t practicle for everyday computing budgets. Thanks to Red Flag Deals, I nabbed a 160GB WD Caviar drive for $90. I then popped down to a local computer store in downtown Waterloo and found a Vantec USB/Firewire 3.5″ drive enclosure for $35. After throwing the drive into the enclosure, I had myself a nice ‘n’ fast backup drive. Oh sure, I could’ve bought one of those fancy pre-built “external hardrives” from a store, but those end up being $100+ than it would cost to just simply buy a drive and enclosure and put it together myself. I’ve been recommending this to people for a couple years, but I finally actually did this for myself recently. Do as I say, yada yada… 😉
Also, again thanks to Red Flag Deals, I found a Dell Inspiron 6400. I configured it to have a dual core CPU, 1GB of RAM, DVD burner, ATI Radeon x1300 graphics and 3-year warranty for ~$1350. Dena and I totally needed a second computer and this one works like a champ. I’m a dual-core CPU believer because of this notebook. I can have iTunes (yes, I’ve dumped Winamp for iTunes…I’ll explain later), Firefox and Visual Studio running while I have Windows Server 2003 coupled with IIS and SQL Server kickin’ inside of a VMware virtual machine. No hiccups or sluggishness at all. None. Yes, it’s still smooth with Ubuntu (LAMP-style) in a VMware virtual machine too. ZSNES runs like the wind, if you were wondering 😉
4 Responses to "on a brighter note"
The geek has returned 😛
Long live the geek…
Have you tried running visual studio inside vmware? i’m very curious if it would be responsive enough in terms of the user interface
And if it seemed likely to work, then the next curious thought is if ubuntu as the host would allow fluid enough operation
I found your post through googling for visual studio and vmware since the vmware forums seem silent on this topic
Once upon a time, I did have Visual Studio 6 running in VMWare (Windows 2000 host / Windows 98 guest) and it was quite responsive. I haven’t installed VS .NET 2003 or 2005 in a virtual machine, since I typically use virtual machines for “servers” and not for dev tools. However, if you have the RAM to devote to the virtual machine, it should run almost as smooth as VS can. If you have 1GB of RAM, you could allocate 512MB to the virtual machine and it should be acceptably usable, as long you don’t have your resources tied up too much by various apps and daemons in Ubuntu. Shut down as many unneccessary services in the Windows guest as possible 😉