Saturday, January 26, 2008

Re: For Web Masters/ Designers

At home I use a Dell OptiPlex 755, Core 2 Duo 2.3GHz w/ 2GB of RAM and
two Dell 20" monitors off an ATI PCI-E video card. When I'm doing web
work I tend to use mostly VIM, Lightroom, WinSCP, and Firefox, while
also having iTunes, Pidgin, and a myriad of other programs open. The
machine runs Vista, mostly b/c I need to know it to support it.

I don't typically do web work at work, but I do tend to keep about 10 -
15 programs open at all times on a similar rig: Dell OptiPlex 745, Core
2 Duo 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 2 Dell 19" monitors. That one runs Windows XP Pro.

Both machines perform admirably. I'm considering moving up to 4GB of
RAM on each, just b/c I do a fair amount of VMware work, but I'm not
ready to move to 64-bit on the desktop yet.

In the past I've found laptops poor for doing heavy duty lifting in
place of a true desktop. They tend to support less RAM, have
significantly slower hard drives, run with lower voltage / lower speed
processors, and use integrated video chipsets. With my OptiPlex, I can
add more RAM, swap out the CPU or video card, or even set up a RAID
controller with SAS drives (if only...). My Latitude D620 cost me about
$1300, my OptiPlex cost me $575 from the outlet (w/out the monitors,
which I already owned), so I'd say I'm getting a pretty fair bang for my
buck.

S
---
Steven Dickenson <sdickenson@keyschool.org>
Computer Network Manager
The Key School, Annapolis Maryland


-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Norman Maynard
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2008 4:27 PM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: For Web Masters/ Designers

For those of you who are web designers, web masters, I'm curious: what
kind
of hardware are you using?

I find that when I am working on our web site, I can often have open:
Dreamweaver, Lightroom, Photoshop, Word, Filezilla, media player,
Firefox
and may be a few other programs open - as well as trying to drive two
monitors, and my poor little laptop just can't handle it.

What kind of rig do you all use?

--=20
Norman Maynard
Principal
Thornton Friends Upper School
Silver Spring, MD

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[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.