Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

For years, the things I have cared about in terms of computing have been, roughly:

1) Internet connectivity. Without it I'm mostly dead in the water.

2) Screen resolution. I want as much code/information on the screen as possible. I currently have a 1920x1200 Dell myself, and am I bit scared/saddened that I won't be able to replace it.

3) Memory. Always good.

After that come processor speed and storage space. I suspect my next machine will have SSD, because I've heard that it's such a dramatic improvement.

I completely agree with Linus though - I very much want a high resolution laptop screen.

View on HN

Once you've gone SSD you'll be amazed you got by without it. It's the biggest single-part speed upgrade I've seen since the 90s. Even just a small on for a system partition, and data kept on a traditional HDD, you'll see great gains.

(And yes, also agree, it's a shame that monitor and laptop resolution seemed to stall at 'HD' for ages)

Any laptop I buy for any one, I always replace it with SSD. Higher dpi doesnot matter much for a programer but higher screen estate or resolution matters more.

Obviously if you're working with massive datasets or many many VM's this may not be true, but everyone I know who has 16GB RAM has claimed that it's more than enough. I've got 8GB, and haven't any complaints. I even know people with 32GB who say that with hindsight they'd have been perfectly happy with only 16GB.

An SSD however, is incredible. I originally wrote "essential", though I guess it's not... but it certainly feels like it is once you have one. The downside is that it will make working with non-SSD desktop machines irritating-as-hell.

Hell, I had 2 GB RAM before and it seemed ok, 8 GB now is more than I need. I had to send the SSD for replacement, though, and it was easily the most frustrating week in recent memory.

RAM is so cheap today, I just maxed it out on my laptop. Granted, I have seen only probably 22GB out of 32GB used when I had YACY (P2P search network written in Java) running, but I still expect having system use rest of RAM for caches which in theory should speedup access to file system (on my SSD drive)

Memory deduplication in Windows 8 [1] will lower RAM usage for VMs further.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/better...

FWIW Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) has a maximum memory limit of 16 GB.

Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate can go up to 192 GB. Windows 8 is limited to 128 GB, but the Professional and Enterprise editions can do 512 GB.

From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...

SSD on my MacBook Air is the one thing that has made more of a difference than anything else.

I can live with only running four or five major apps at a time in the 4 Gigabytes that came with my 2010 MacBook Air - but the SSD changed my life. I'd put that on your list above memory.

After having bought an SSD a couple of years ago I can honestly say it is at the top of my requirement list (after internet connectivity, but it's basically impossible to buy a computer that can't connect to the internet) for all my computers, easily above memory and screen resolution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com