I recently upgraded my primary computer from a 15″ MacBookPro with 4 GB of RAM to a 17″ MacBookPro with 8 GB of RAM. That probably sounds gratuitous. Here’s why it’s not:
I’m currently running:
- Mac OS 10.5.6
- Adium (IM chat client)
- Mail.app (e-mail client)
- iCal (calendar application)
- iTunes (music)
- OmniFocus (GTD todo list)
- TextMate (text editor)
- Preview (image viewer – for looking at screenshots, scanned requirements docs)
- PostgreSQL (CouponEngine database)
- pgAdmin (postgreSQL client and admin app)
- Terminal
- Safari 4 (primary browser)
- Firefox 3 (for testing look and feel)
- Eclipse (development environment)
- Windows XP (running in Parallels-for testing and Oracle)
- Oracle 10G (ATG database)
- JBoss 4.0 + ATG 2006.3 with full Commerce stack
- JBoss 4.2 + Seam application
- ANT JVMs for running builds
This is what I need to run to do my job, and it takes more than 4 GB of RAM.
Now that I have 8 GB, I’m not longer running into swapping and paging delays, and I’m much more productive.
Having close to twice the screen real estate (~70% more I think), a faster CPU, and 8 hours of battery life don’t hurt either. This is the perfect machine for me.
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