ThinkPad as development machine

Published on December 23, 2007 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

For the first time ever, my main desktop machine is also a laptop. I never thought that day would come.

For the past 3 years, my desktop PC has been what I thought as a very powerful Pentium 4 based Dell XPS system. But after getting a new ThinkPad T61 laptop, I did some benchmarks and discovered that the ThinkPad was substantially faster than the Dell (other than in the hard drive area where both are roughly equal).

During the holiday, I plan to work on computer AI in Galactic Civilizations and today I got the laptop set up with all the various development tools to get going on that. It's the first time I've coded on Windows Vista so it should be quite interesting to see how that works out.

Comments

Sir_On_The_Edge

on Dec 24, 2007

I'd be very much interested in hearing your later experiences with this, mostly how vista effects your day to day work.

afaust

on Dec 24, 2007

I've been using Vista off and on since Release Candidate 1. Until about a month ago I had always gone back to XP after about a week because there were too many problems. The previous time I had Vista installed, I actually went back to XP because Galactic Civilizations 2 didn't run properly. However, about a month ago I installed again and loaded up all the patches and it's ran great. There had been some performance & compatability updates that completely fixed the problems I was having.

Development on Vista has worked quite well for a long time. Visual Studio 2005 runs fine so long as you install all the service packs. Visual Studio 2008 works perfectly. All the other tools I run on a day to day basis (UltraEdit, XmlSpy, Launchy, etc.) work perfectly.

Sir_On_The_Edge

on Dec 24, 2007

Personally it works fine for all games and everything I've tried. However I don't use it professionally, so couldn't possibly comment on whether I would recommend it to everybody.

CobraA1

on Dec 27, 2007

I've been using Vista for a while now, and here's my verdict:

Do not, under any circumstance, use it on an older machine. There's just too many problems. Put it on when you build a new machine, or buy a machine that already has it installed.

To be honest, I don't like running it on anything less than a Core 2.

And oh, yeah - don't use it with less than 2 GB of memory, unless you love waiting for Windows to swap everything in/out of memory all the time.

Quite frankly, it's not even worth bothering with until SP1 (except for development purposes), which has many improvements including a roll up of all of the bug fixes - and there are a lot of bug fixes.

BUT: It's not that bad of an OS when you've got all of the incompatibilities out of the way. I've yet to have any troubles with games made for Windows XP. Even with 64 bit Vista (which I'm running right now), everything works once all of the drivers are up to date. Just remember to keep on top of graphics driver updates, because they've been coming pretty frequently.

As a developer, though: You need to have at least one development machine running Vista.

Because, even though the OS looks the same to the user, it's totally alien to the developer. The user files are all in a different folder. Programs that access admin stuff need to be compatible with UAC. Both the sound and graphics systems have been totally rewritten. "Program Files" is now read only and user stuff is expected to be in the user's own folders, and the list goes on. Despite the similarities to XP from the user's perspective, Vista is totally different under the hood.

Braeburn9

on Dec 29, 2007

I bought an HP dv9000t this last March which came with a Version of Vista. I've been thrilled with the computer ever since. I can't say it replaces my desktop which runs XP (couple of games don't run and graphics still aren't as good).

I've been mostly using the computer for program development and I found Vista doesn't get in the way of that. I think after Vista SP1 the OS will be a great system to migrate to and develop on. DX10 alone is worth the move when you're ready to get the new hardware.

Doctor Evil

on Dec 29, 2007

So far, I've limited Vista to running client (web) demos, and email. kept my dev tools on an XP desktop.

However....

Other than navigating to where I want a file to be stored (Vista's design is NOT that intuitive), I am beginning to like it. It's fast (mind you the laptop is new), however games like GalCiv2 does cause it to overheat.

I recently installed CS2 on the the Vista Laptop, and despite having on 2GB of memory, have had few problems.

I hate my touchpad with the laptop, but my wireless mouse solves that.

slowly but surely... Vista is seeming to be more and more like something I would actually recommend. reminds me of the heady days of Win98, and it's early adoption issues...

David

Graviton

on Dec 29, 2007

For the first time ever, my main desktop machine is also a laptop.

Since 6 years now I use a laptop as my only computer for work and games. Right now I have a Think Pad Z60m. Think Pads are really good and I never had a hardware problem with them. There was once this issue with faulty batteries but mine always worked fine. The one downside laptops have is that you can only uprage the harddisk and the Ram.

So Frogboy do you use a T60 or T60p? Since the p version has a more powerfull graphic card.

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