Check out the bundled machines from NewEgg. I buy the parts and do it myself, so I can't say from personal experience, but from people I know that have bought them, they are happy.
hmm..I didn't even realized they sold bundles on NewEgg.
Top quality:
Microway - must have deep pockets.
PS. As mentioned above, iMac, MacBook Pro.... But you are planning to develop MS aps.
Developing MS Apps in a fusion VM is actually a pretty good idea. You can reconfigure your VM for single or multiple CPUs, vary the memory amount and do away with any driver specific oddities. The best performing "PC" I've ever had has been a Fusion VM on my iMac. Its the only one that has never blues screened on me.
Plus, if you set up fusion properly, you could have the MacOS side of things provide code management - check in, check out, revision control, version diffs - because its still Unix.
You could also test different versions of windows just be shutting one VM down, and starting up a new one.
I like the build quality of Apple but use the software of Microsoft. You can get an iMac or Mac Pro, and just make the Mac OS X partition as small as possible, and then use all the remaining disk space for Windows via Boot Camp. The Lion drivers work nearly flawlessly.
I would probably never use the Mac side. In fact, my first experience with Mac OS was just recently on my girlfriend's Macbook, or whatever the hell they're called, and I wasn't very impressed in the least bit. If a non-biased person can give me a good technical reason to go with Apple hardware versus PC, I'll consider it.
Very light requirements. Really and PC would do.
Is space an issue ?
Dual monitors are great for writing code.
Dual monitor video cards = $40
I'm starting to think I could probably get away with a PC for around $600 or so. I hardly do anything else other than what I described in my first post. I definitely would want dual monitors. Ever since my first experience with them at work, I've wanted to get some at home. Space is not an issue, I have a server that I store all my stuff on.
I usually use
http://ibuypower.com for premade systems (They don't have any of the cases I love anymore though
).
http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/ and they carry a lot of the hot-swap cases I prefer (I haven't used them however).
I'd suggest doing a custom configuration just so you can be sure your system fits your needs.
Thanks, will have a look
Do you prefer Intel or AMD or does it not matter to you...
And what have you set as a budget if any?
By your requirements I would say almost anything current would work for you ...with the only thing to focus on being cpu and ram... and even so I don't see you say playing games as a requirement and the comment of not having time for toys anymore would lead me to think that you don't need some fantastic type of video card just something that is enough to render an image on a monitor.
Playing music on any current hardware is pretty lightweight itself especially if you will not be loading the machine up with crapware...and since it looks like your a building a dev box there won't be much on there I would assume that will gobble up resources.
Anything with 4-8 gigs of ram and a quad core or better and you can't go wrong really for what your looking to do in fact it could even be overkill...I have no clue at how resource intensive development w/ .net or sql server can be but if you take an audit of all the software you will be running simultaneously and add up their memory requirements and double them, generally speaking you have the amount you need give or take if you don't want to make a science out of it.
I do not have a preference on Intel or AMD. I've used both in the past and have had good experiences with both.
I don't really have a set budget - really, I'm going to end up paying for what I need.
As for the video card, I did forget to mention that I'll be using Photoshop/Fireworks/Illustrator for some graphics work. So, while yes, I will need it to be enough to render an image, it will have to be of pretty decent quality. But yes, nothing to the extremes of what a hardcore gamer would get for his/her system.
I definitely won't be loading it up with any crapware.
I was definitely thinking between 6-8 gigs for memory, simply because any less usually causes Visual Studio to be a complete ****. As for applications running together while I'm developing, I'll typically have Firefox and Chrome open, Outlook, and SQL Server Management Studio.
In the past, I've always bought through Dell. I can honestly say I've never had any bad desktop experiences, however, it's the complete opposite with the notebooks I've purchased from them. Just looking for alternatives and since I know there are a few people who do the kind of work that I do here, thought I'd get some good input. So far I've seen some helpful things