Best Visual Studio Hardware Upgrade

Question

I have a fairly modern developer desktop (E6600, ASUS PN5-E, 2 GB of RAM, 350 GB of SATA2, Vista Ultimate x32), but I would like to squeeze some more. I am wondering what the best upgrade for hacking equipment would be.

If I limit my budget to 150GBP (~ $ 300USD), what will people say, will this give me the best performance boost in development? (Note that I have MSDN, so I can go for x64 if that gives me anything.)

I read the Jeff Atwood Ultimate Developer Rig series , and I think adding the 10,000K Raptor RPM and downloading from them would be the best (presumably I will start all my projects from another drive, if that matters?).

Edit 1: Sorry, I had to say - I already have two monitors, but a great answer for anyone with only one! I want the car to be as fast as I can get it.

Edit 2: Ok, I accepted the answer for getting another monitor (and I love the comment to get three of them!). I did not mention this initially, but this is by far the best upgrade for money. However, since I have two monitors (one 1600x1200, one 1280x1024), I will go for Raptor. I gladly supported the answers of Albert and Antik! I looked at perfmom at runtime, and the drive is the one that maximizes the maximum. Thanks everyone for the answers :)

Answer 1

If you don’t have one, go to several monitors, you will never regret it. It will not update your performance, not on your computer.

Jeff Atwood says this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000012.html

Answer 2

A 10k RPM drive is a good idea.

You want both Visual Studio and your working copies to be on the 10,000 rpm disk if you go this route: where all your disk I / O operations will occur during development, so that your fastest the disk has been used, the most important thing is.

Jeff $ .02 on this topic: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000800.html

Answer 3

Get 2 GB more RAM. It should be within your budget.

Answer 4

Secondly, the problem with multiple monitors. As for the 10K drive, I have one. I’m sure that it took about 15 seconds from the moment the power was turned off to logging into Vista (in the domain), but if you don’t tap on the disk during development, this will not help. Given your setup, I would really spend money on a large 4Gig memory if MB can support it, then upgrade to x64. Of course, this suggests that memory is your bottleneck now (probably there is). What does perfmon say about memory usage?

Answer 5

We are looking at the same thing right now. It seems like ScottGu is offering a hard drive, perhaps the best route ...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx

Answer 6

On the side of the note: I once tried installing high-performance RAM software, and then moved everything possible to this drive. Everything except .NET platform files (project files, temporary files, compiled files, etc.) was moved for ASP.NET development . I would have thought that this would make a bigger difference the more RAM or the faster the disk, but it does not make any difference. . The problem is that the main culprit is the Windows drive. So, the recommendations of Jeff and Scott in other answers relate to the system as a whole.

Answer 7

Two weeks ago, I built a new installation based on Jeff's recommendations. From what I could work out, the 300 gigabyte hard drive has the biggest impact. If you do, then put most of your development tools and projects on this disk. Do not use a "different" disk for something that you will use several times a day - use a Velociraptor for all developments.

Answer 8

Yes, definitely upgrade to 64-bit if you can (if you don’t play several old PC games) with at least 4 GB of memory. The problem of reinstalling x64 OS and software may outweigh the benefits for now.

More memory, a faster system drive, and a separate data drive are probably the easiest performance gains.

If you are adding a 3rd monitor, you will most likely need a second graphics card, preferably the same make / model.