Today I realized just how expensive it's going to be to get going with .NET, when I asked the company I'm contracting with what sort of system I need to use for development. The answer, "A 1 GHz or better Pentium with at least 256 Megs of RAM. Anything less and you'll be frustrated. You'll also want that to be a dedicated machine or at least a dedicated partition."
It's the last part that has me worried. A Microsoft shop is telling me to sacrifice a full machine to the .NET gods. I'm not sure exactly why yet (I'll let you know) but for now I plan to play it safe and trust them.
Taking stock of my computer inventory, I have lots of old machines: No use. I have my main machine, a nice 850 MHz laptop with 384 Megs. It was top-of-the-line 18 months ago. Sadly it's already borderline for real .NET development. I could use it anyway and suffer the slowness, but I don't want to dual boot between a development partition and a real partition day after day. I need another machine.
You can predict what logical step I'm going to take next! I should use this dinosaur laptop for the .NET development and score myself a shiny new laptop! One with a SWDVD/CDRW combo drive! One with Wi-Fi built right in! One that costs $3,000! No, no, no, I must resist. This 850 MHz is good enough for everything else I do, no need to spend the big cash right now. Plus it's supremely annoying to migrate machines.
Good logic dictates I should get a $1,000 desktop machine, nothing fancy. Yikes, then I'll only be able to develop at the home office, not on the road where I spend large chunks of my time, and I can't bill when I'm not developing.
So have I talked myself into the shiny new laptop yet?