My Ideal Computer(s)

I'm putting together something that's close to, and will asymptotically approach my ideal. But it's a big step ahead of what I had last week.

The base is a Lenovo W520, a workstation class notebook with a 15" screen, fitted out with with 8 Core i7 cores running at 2+GHz, and 6 GB of memory, and the latest addition to the family: A Samsung 24GB SSD.

Layered on that is a recent Linux distribution. I'm using Mint 14 with the Cinnamon interface. It boots up in less than 20 seconds--not ideal, but acceptable. Half that time is the BIOS. There may be a way to make BIOS boot faster, a topic for research once I stop provisioning my machine and get some actual work done.

Layered on that are my "real" computers, the ones where I work, all virtualized.  One is my main programming environment, Linux machine, a Mint variant with a KDE interface, just to try something a little different. Another is a clean install of Windows 7, business, which I intend to morph into a Windows alternate for programming and testing. A third is my "old" Windows 7 business machine, virtualized. Then I plan to add virtualized machines of other vintages. The Linux versions

First, my Linux programming environment. It's a different variant of my Mint distribution, with the tools that I use newly installed. It will grow over time, and right now it features Git, Vim, Node and NPM, and will shortly be joined by a bunch of Web client and server add-ons, too numerous to mention. Right now it's 5.3 GB. I will make a separate post with its contents.

Then my Windows environment. Right now a clean install of Windows business, but soon to have the same things installed as on my Linux distro. Right now it's 6.3 GB.

I've also got a clean Ubuntu distribution loaded. Right now it's 4.2GB.

Then my day-to-day old environment. I virtualized my old Windows machine using VMWare's vCenter, after removing a bunch of software that I either didn't need or planned to install after the transition. It's a monster, weighing in at nearly 80GB. That will get slimmed down over time.

So right now I'm using 109GB, which I expect will rise, then drop.

What's cool is the performance.

 Here's a steady-state baseline. I've got two Chrome browsers running. Once for this blog, the other paused on YouTube (streaming Mark Knopfler)

Here's Virtualbox loading. That little blip. It pops up so fast that the first time I wondered what was wrong.

 Now I load my Linux development VM.

 Here I save it, and reload.

Here's Windows 7 Business loading You can see the boost in memory usage, but still low at the end.

Once it's loaded, the profile looks pretty good.  Then I saved the image and reloaded it from a saved state, rather than a fresh boot.

Here's my Windows 7 monster loading. It wasn't finished at the end of 60 seconds. There's another blip that I didn't record. But once installed it was also a low resource user.