Visual Studio is a resource hog. I love it but it seems designed for a beefy desktop. It sounds like you're trying to buy a laptop with desktop specs, which just means you're going to pay $$ for the compact parts. The laptop will only feel fast for a handful of years as well, because Visual Studio will upgrade and target the latest desktop specs. A couple of alternatives... 1) Have two machines, and on the laptop use msbuild without Visual Studio. You can keep working on parts of the code in slimmer editors, and use Visual Studio when you're sitting at your desktop. 2) Have a beefy desktop at home, and just remote into it with a cheap laptop. I do this a lot. Saves money because desktop parts are cheaper. All your code is in one place and you don't have to sync. The drawback is that you can't run 3D games over a remote connection, so if you're doing game development you'll have to go back to the PC.
All of my friends at uni do use a laptop with Visual Studio, and it's fine for them. In fact, it wasn't that bad on my current laptop: it takes 5 minutes to boot, and sometimes if I do Ctrl + X it freezes for 10 seconds which I find really strange. But it usually works fine! The laptop I'll be buying now (the one which Tom linked in his second post here) seems to be a lot better than this one (8 GB RAM, SSD, quad-core processor), so I think it will be fine for years to come! It is a good idea to use a slimmer editor, though. Sometimes, when I just want to make some small changes, I simply edit my files in Notepad++ instead of starting Visual Studio for it.
Having an SSD should help a ton with those load times. And, wow, it would be fantastic if that would work out. Please keep us/me updated, I'm really curious how it turns out.
For sure you can do this. My caution is that the sluggishness you experience is pretty common, mostly due to how Visual Studio runs. (Plus antivirus disk contention, etc, etc.) If you were in my area I'd recommend looking at something like this: https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Tracer-III-15-Slim-100
I don't find this to be true. My visual studio opens up very quickly on my Asus. I'm not sure why it's taking so long for you guys. I use it mainly for C++. 5 Minutes to boot is a lot. Mine is < 15 seconds. I think a lot of people (users) don't really know how to keep their system healthy and get the max output out of their hardware. Throwing money at a problem solves many things, but sometimes just inspecting why a pc is running slow in the first place can really help a lot. Do a bit of tidying up, see what services are running, processes, start up applications, registry, cache usage, ram usage and I/O process. I tend to make sure what ever is running is what I need or my OS needs, if not it get's killed and cleaned. In other words I'm very strict with my resources. Doesn't mean because I have a lot I should be wasteful.
Overall I agree with you. 5-minutes is crazy and could mean the disk is dying. My experience with VS on a low-mid specs is that it does a poor job managing background tasks and concurrent compile/links. (I also work on giant projects.) As MCSaw said, regular maintenance and pruning is needed on Windows. If the machine was fast in the past, you might be able to just clean it.
It's probably just because it's on a slow and fragmented 5400 RPM 2.5" harddrive, while other programs are also running, filling up the RAM and blablabla. Replacing the HDD with an SSD would be like entering another world (or heaven ).
I personally prefer to do gaming (and 3D rendering and such) on my PC and leave the less demanding tasks for my laptop (which I normally use on the road). Although laptops have become pretty powerful these days they don't quite match up to a desktop. Which makes me wonder if a powerful desktop combined with a regular laptop wouldn't work for you? I'm using a high end PC with a ditto monitor and that experience can't weigh up to a laptop in any way shape or form IMO. A nice big HD monitor and a PC powerful enough to put it to good use? It's very nice. In contrast using a light weight laptop (Intel Celeron processor, 4Gb memory and 128Gb SSD) which is also a 2-in-1 device (I can fold the screen 360 degrees and turn the device into a "tablet"), and this combination really works out well for me. Of course I don't plan on using my laptop for gaming (though it runs Minecraft quite nicely) and mostly for Office related tasks and a bit of programming though VS Code. But yeah, if possible I'd try to separate them to get the best from both worlds.
Not in the foreseeable future. A desktop pc takes up room, whereas a laptop pc doesn't really. My desk isn't that large, and if I'd expand it it'd get in the way of my 'bed' and/or piano. Anyway, it's looking like I can pick it up Friday evening.
You can also put a computer under your desk or bed, and a monitor + keyboard doesn't really take up that much space... But, woot, awesome!
Thanks, but actually, no. My feet go under my desk and have as little room as I'd like them to have (actually, just a bit less ), and I don't have a bed (which is why I put 'bed' between quotation marks ). I know there would probably be a way to make it work, but I won't, for now.
This is (one of the many many reasons) why I live and will stay at home when going to university. You could also buy a bed frame thingy? Or use the computer as a night stand? Or put it in the closet? Or ontop of the closet? Or in the hallway? ...
Got it! I showed it to my housemates, and one of them was sceptical about it not having an i7... but he had to admit that this was a great deal! We'll see, I have a feeling that I'll be rather impressed with its speed.
Woot, that's fantastic! Having an i5 or i7 in itself doesn't say that much. There are also many mobile dual core i7s, and I can assure you that a newer quad core i5 will be much faster in quad core tasks. In general, the difference between an i5 and an i7 is mostly just cores and/or threads. If you don't need more threads, then an i5 will do just as well as a similar i7. Anyways, I'm happy you were able to obtain it, and I hope that it was a good purchase!
I've mostly been able to get my laptop as I want it, but there are still some things that need to be done, and some things I can't figure out. Most importantly, though: https://empireminecraft.com/threads/audio-issues-on-laptop.80201/
I'm also having some graphical issues, and Minecraft kept crashing, but maybe that's fixed now (I've got another thread about it) But I just found another issue, something which I hadn't considered at all until it was a problem: this thing's got 2-key rollover... That's bad! I get it's not intended for gaming, but I thought all modern keyboards had at least 3... my old laptop did!
