By orthoducks on

I'm currently doing Drupal development on an office computer with a one-core 2.8 GHz Pentium processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a 7200 RPM SATA (150 MB/sec) hard disk. Performance is pretty good, although I plan to increase the RAM to 2 GB.

I'm interested in setting up a parallel development environment on my portable computer. I wonder whether (1) it's powerful enough to make this feasible, and (2) there are ways I can tweak it to make it work better.

The configuration would be: 1.8 GHz one-core Pentium; 1.5 GB RAM; typical 5400 RPM hard disk, about 3 years old; Windows XP Tablet Edition. Software would be: Drupal 6.2 with Apache and MySQL; Zend Studio for development work. RAM could be expanded to 2 GB if the benefit justifies the cost.

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

I don't think you will have any problems using that laptop. Though if it were me, I wouldn't be doing much else on it then development and such. The fewer processes that are running the better.

If you are adventurous, you can install a linux flavor with a UI and leave windows behind on the laptop.

orthoducks’s picture

orthoducks commented

The word about development on this type of machine is good to hear.

The laptop serves as my "brain extender" when I'm traveling, just as my desktop machine does when I'm at home. To leave Windows behind I would have to convert my entire life to Linux, which require a disproportionate amount of work.

One of the items on my "to do" list is to try out Parallels, which would let me shift my Drupal development to Linux while keeping everything else on Windows. If that works well I may consider doing the same on the laptop, but it isn't going to happen right away.

styro’s picture

styro commented

The configuration would be: 1.8 GHz one-core Pentium; 1.5 GB RAM; typical 5400 RPM hard disk, about 3 years old; Windows XP Tablet Edition. Software would be: Drupal 6.2 with Apache and MySQL; Zend Studio for development work. RAM could be expanded to 2 GB if the benefit justifies the cost.

I sometimes do development on a laptop like that (a bit older though with a 1.5GHz Pentium M) and XP Pro. It works fine although MySQL feels a little sluggish (probably due to the disk speed). I haven't bothered trying to tune it though because it isn't "bad enough" - I only really notice it when doing something intensive like saving the modules page or emptying the cache tables.

I use Komodo Edit (not IDE) though - I don't know how much heavier the full IDE or Zend Studio would be.

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Anton
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