I’ve just been through an office move at a client site and packing it up got me thinking about the choices that companies make for their staff when it comes to computer hardware. Most users can benefit in some way from having faster computers, with bigger screens, and better input peripherals. Corporations have a tendency to make conservative choices and to pay above the market price for standard hardware. Whilst frustrating for normal users, this is an absolute performance killer for developers like me.

Compare the specifications of my home machine to my work computer:

My home configuration can be purchased for around $1200 today, and is many times more powerful than the work configuration. The ability to run multiple virtual machines as if they are real desktops gives a fantastic boost to my developer productivity. The screen real estate is beneficial for rapidly updating web pages, and the fast hard drives ensures that Windows keeps up with what I’m doing.

Since I don’t run Antivirus at home I run as a user without administrative rights. If I need to test out new pieces of software from the Internet I use a Windows XP Virtual Machine running Windows OneCare Antivirus. Removing the performance overhead of antivirus means that I get the most performance out of my hardware whilst still staying safe. Did you know that simply running Windows with a standard user account can eliminate the threat of most Windows malware?

My advice to anyone buying hardware for development use is to buy the best performing hardware you can afford. Don’t focus on any single component as skipping a dual screen configuration is not worth the price of a faster processor.

Almost everyone I know complains about the performance of their computer when an anti-virus (A/V) product has installed, and thinks they need more memory or a faster processor. Wrong! You need to get a faster hard disk, or disable scanning of certain files.

You’ll see from Task Manager that memory and other resources are plentiful on a modern computer, but page faults and other disk I/O (hidden by default) are occurring at very high levels. Disk I/O is still slow on modern computers and you’ll get better performance gains from improving this aspect.

Most A/V software has settings that let you control:

• Scanning inside archives like .zip files. Only files downloaded from the Internet or via other media are major threats. Consider tweaking these settings to avoid scanning too deeply into archives, or only scan in risky locations (external drives or downloads folder).
• Directories that excluded from automatic scanning. Real-time protection is valuable for certain users, but there may be files that a user must access very frequently. These include databases or virtual machines. Consider disabling real-time scanning of these files/folders.

Making changes to these settings will benefit performance, and security can still be maintained to a very high level. You are running Windows under a normal user account, aren’t you?