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(Re) Installation stories

Computer ProblemsAfter delaying it for as long as I could, I've decided to reinstall my laptop, again.

It all started when I began to notice that general slowness, firstly builds ran slower, VS got sluggish, and then it spread to the rest of the machine... all of that I could have dealt with for a while, but then the major crap started:

First thing that went this time was my mouse, or basically the USB ports. Just informed me 'unrecognised USB device', and the only way to resolve it was to reboot. (Please note I'm using past tense - this is because reboot doesn't fix it anymore, it is just screwed now and I need to use the touch pad the whole time)
The next thing that started to happen (maybe because of all the reboots I had to do for the mouse) my laptop didn't want to restart on its own anymore. Indifferent I had to manually switch it off and on with the power button - bad, bad, bad.

By this time I knew a reinstall was imminent, but I tried to hold out for another while, as a reinstall means that one damn important file or project that you somehow missed while doing the backup (why does it always have to be an important one? Well, you could say the other ones you don’t miss…) Anyway, D-day was drawing closer…

By now my machine was having problems booting up. I will switch it on, and then it will just freeze during start up. To rectify this, I had to switch it off and on again a couple of times and after a while it will actually get into Windows. The final straw was today, while my machine was creeping along with no mouse, my keyboard and touchpad stopped working. In other words, my laptop started to freeze intermittently, also obviously, he decides to do this just after I spent 30 mins filling in the inventory of our house for the moving company – had to do that ALL over.

So now I’m reinstalling and wondered:
1. What kind of company dev machines do you have? Laptops or PCs?
2. What’s the average spec?
3. How often does your company upgrade the machines?

Posted: Apr 18 2007, 04:45 PM by Thea Burger | with 8 comment(s)
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Comments

Craig Nicholson said:

1. Noname brands PC (Oh well at least it has a proper Intel motherboard in it!)

2. Pentium 4 2.4Ghz+ or a Pentium D with at least 1 gig of RAM but sometimes 2 gigs if the developer is really lucky.

3. When something breaks or we run out of PCs.

Its sad but true.

# April 18, 2007 8:46 PM

colin said:

You should try opening up all the panels underneath the laptop an reseat all the cards (particularly the ram), sometimes that fixes those freeze ups. It's worth a try.

# April 19, 2007 6:30 AM

barend said:

Had a HP widescreen laptop, but the centrino processor just wasn't made for developers, the moment you hit sql server, everything dies a slow death.

Now have a Pentium D 2.8Ghz with 2GB of ram, and not enough diskspace at work, and a Pentium D 3.4 with 2GB of ram and 3 x 200GB SATA drives at home, still need to upgrade to a dual lcd display both sides.

When another dept needs a workstation, we order new ones for ourselves and pass the old ones on, so about once a year

# April 19, 2007 8:41 AM

Prieur du Plessis said:

I don't develop myself, but I do buy the pc's :)

1) We use HP business notebooks exclusively. I prefer HP's because they just seem to work better than the rest. And look a lot better too :P

2) At least 1 GB or 2 GB RAM. CPU wise as fast as we can afford. Core Duo or Core 2 Duo as far a possible.

3) At least once every year, year and a half, for the developers, then they get handed down to the other people. We only buy more RAM for the notebooks and don't upgrade them any other way.

My personal favourite is the HP nc8430 and HP nx8440.  

# April 19, 2007 1:17 PM

Willie Roberts said:

Work: HP NX9420 (1.8Ghz Duo / 2GB RAM / 80GB Drive)

Home: Acer TravelMate 5620 (2.0Ghz Duo / 1GB RAM / 120GB Drive)

We generally swap notebooks once a year, depending on the existing warranties. Depending on your needs your allocated a notebook, which we get from HP directly.

We mostly run HP machines inside the company, at home I use no name brand machines I build myself, and upgrade when or if needed and the money is there!

# April 19, 2007 2:21 PM

Thea Burger said:

RIP - my laptop died. It couldn't boot up anymore and  is now in the workshop. I hope I get a new one :)

It was an HP nx6110, almost 2 years old, 1.2 GB RAM, Centrino processor(agree 100% with you, Barend).  

Usually, we get upgrades (only RAM) yearly, but I feel these machines are just not strong enough anymore. Want to start playing around with WPF, etc and it will just kill these machines...

# April 19, 2007 2:40 PM

Ryan said:

1. Laptop cause I out at various client sites most of the time. Would prefer to go back to a desktop workstation though. Can get a heck of a lot more fire power for the same cash. 2. Running a DELL Insprion 9400. 17" 200Gig HDD 2Gig RAM Core 2 Duo @ 2Ghz. Awesome machine, not the smallest to carry around though. i love my dell. i love their free (ok built into the cost of the machine) onsite next business day support. I recently spilt coffee all over my notebook and it went dead. The next day a tech arrived onsite and pretty much swapped my HDD out into a new one and off he went again. :) 3. Um .... whenever I can afford it. :D
# April 20, 2007 7:59 AM

Thea Burger's Blog said:

In view of my prior frustrating experience upgrading a Microsoft product (complete reinstall), I was

# July 23, 2007 4:13 PM