After a nearly three year experiment, I have decided to go back to a desktop machine at home.
Reasons:
1) My Gateway M8510 was getting really long in the tooth. When the new entry level desktops are coming out with miles of more performance, it was tough. Oddly, I could still do 95% of my work on a 3 year old Pentium M 1.73 GHz with 2 GB of DDR.
2) I had last year’s low-end Gateway system sitting in my closet. A quick peek at Passmark scores showed that even a sad Sempron 2.2 GHz beat the living crap out of my system. So, I pulled that low end system out of the closet. Slapped an ATI Radeon X1300 into it (I can already hear webmonkey laughing in the background) and exchanged the 1 GB of DDR2 with 2 GB of DDR2 from my home server and fired it up.
Between me and my brother we had two low-end 18.5″ displays, so I have an expanded desktop for the first time in forever.
Sadly, this system is enormously faster than my crappy Centrino system. So I am starting to see Intel’s logic in rebranding their ICs going forward. I also found out what will drive the need for higher speed systems, virtualization. I’ll start playing around with virtualization and trying to optimize my distributed systems at the same time.
Now, my upgrade bug has started again.