While this is not much like a programming issue directly, it affects my development activities, and therefore it seems to belong here.
It seems that more and more developers are turning to virtual environments for development activities on their computers, and SharePoint development is a prime example. In addition, as a trainer, I have virtual learning environments for all the classes that I teach.
I recently purchased the new Dell E6510 for travel. It has an i7 620M (dual core processor, 2.66 GHz HyperThreaded processor) and 8 GB of memory. Reading the spec, it sounded like it would be a great laptop to port and run virtual machines.
Getting a laptop, though, I was very disappointed with the user experience in developing a virtual machine. Providing a virtual machine with 4 GB of memory, it was slow, and I could enter full sentences and observe the "trick" of the virtual machine.
My company has training notebooks that we offer for our classes. This is the Dell Precision M6400 Intel Core 2 Duo P8700, operating at 2.54 GHz, with 8 GB of memory, and the experience on these laptops is day and night compared to the E6510. They are clear, and you hardly know that you are working in a virtual environment.
Since the E6510 should be faster in all categories than the M6400, I could not understand why the new laptop was slower, so I compared the component by component and the only place where the E6510 is less efficient than the M6400. graphic department. The M6400 runs the nVidia FX 2700m GPU, while the E6510 runs the nVidia 3100M GPU. Looking at the benchmarks of the two GPUs, we can assume that the FX 2700M is twice as fast as the 3100M.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html
3100M = 111th (E6510)
FX 2700m = 47th (Precision M6400)
Radeon HD 5870 = 8th (Alienware)
The host OS is Windows 7 64bit as a guest OS running in Virtual Box 3.1.8 with guest add-ons installed on the guest. The IDE used in the virtual environment is VS 2010 Premium.
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Cheers,
Dave
EDIT:
: 7200 /, E6510 500 M6400 2x 250 RAID.
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