Development Workstation on a Budget

I haven't built a PC from scratch in quite some time but I have gotten tired of working on my laptop and decided it was time to build a new development workstation. 

Around the same time that Scott Hanselman was building his “Ultimate” developer PC I was building my “Premium” developer PC if you are going off of Visual Studio SKU names.  I didn’t want to break the bank and put down $3k like Scott.  My target was to build the best workstation I could for less than $2000.

I typically run many programs at the same time and often enough have some virtual machine running as well.  It was important for me to have enough RAM and CPU power to run all the apps required on a daily basis.

Goals

  1. Multi Core – Looking for minimum Quad core, but really want to go Hexa core (6 Core)
  2. Lots of RAM (Minimum 8GB)
  3. Fast hard drives (Sata III, SSD for boot, 7200rpm for data)
  4. Storage space (Raid 0 1TB)
  5. Decent graphics to support multiple monitors (Dual DVI + 1GB)

More...

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Hardware

Update your Droid Incredible to Froyo (Android 2.2)

Recently Verizon Wireless finally announced that the Droid Incredible would receive an update to bring it up to Android 2.2 (Froyo).  The OTA update started rolling out on Friday, Aug. 27 but I wasn’t one of the fortunate ones to get it.  And as of this afternoon I still haven’t received it. Every couple hours I would catch myself manually checking for the update and I was disappointed each time.  I was getting impatient and didn’t want to wait anymore.

Someone was finally able to track down the OTA url and Android Central posted a quick tutorial on how to manually download the update package and update the phone.  I was a little hesitant at first but once I saw that update url was coming down directly from Google I felt better.

The upgrade went very smooth and so far have no complaints.  I haven’t noticed much speed improvement, but some of the new features are looking promising.

Dinc Froyo

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Trying to get back into blogging…

I’m going to make another attempt to start blogging again.  This time around I’m just going to try post things that I find useful and not make posts long and drawn out.

If people find it useful then great, otherwise I’ll just have some resources to go back to when I need to reference something I’ve done in the past.

Right now I'm just using this theme that I found, but once I have a little more time I plan on creating a custom design.

Wish me luck!

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