On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 05:39:28AM -0800, Drew wrote:
> > Agreed! The cramped screen space (I run dual vid cards in sli with 4
> > monitors with development apps spread all over them!), sluggish response
> > (open what I have running on my work station and any laptop goes into
> > crawl mode), heat (if you really run it in your lap as the name infers)
> > and that just touches on the very start of my list. Yes, I have few
> > laptops and use them when I 'need' to and one often times goes with me
> > when I leave my office (but my phone is rapidly replacing that need
> > unless I'm going for days)... but why on earth would I consider using
> > only a laptop? Well, if I was always mobile, but I'm not. Maybe if I
> > didn't need to run any development systems... Eclipse on a laptop
> > certainly works, but is sluggish vs. a workstation. Open Dreamweaver,
> > Photoshop, Eclipse, three web browsers a secure shell or few, email, IM,
> > and then need to open a Word attachment and most laptops chug to worst
> > than a crawl.
>
> And the funny thing, from my perspective at least, is that I'm sitting
> beside a laptop that routinely has several VMware VM's running (XP &
> Server 2008r2), several line of business applications open, and has
> dreamweaver *and* gimp running in the background. :) All this on a two
> year old i3 w/ 6GB RAM. Set me back around $900.
>
> Larger screen? VGA or HDMI outputs. ;-) Nothing quite beats working on
> a 55" HDTV in your living room, especially when I have time for STO.
Very similar experience here, too.
I think all boils down to energy and if the marginal increase
in productivity on desktop HW is worth it.
Desktop components are optimized for performance with a lot
less regards for power than those for mobile devices. Besides,
the OS attempts and can be further tuned to use better the HW
energy wise when installed on a mobile device -- and here we
get just a bit closer to the topic of this list. :-)
Try to gauge how much of the time (wall clock time) you use
the CPU cores close to their full power during a typical day.
There are several tools that may help. That will give the
percentage of your working time when the higher performance of
the desktop HW *may* get you a boost in productivity. Also,
power the system though an energy meter and read it after 24h.
I bet that unless your usage is kind of specific, such as
simulations, video rendering, or batches of algorithm-heavy
image processing, the time you really use such HW close to full
capacity is really small. However, the power drain, even when
idle, is a lot higher compared to even a high end laptop's.
Besides, it's common practice to suspend the laptop session
during night time. How many consider doing that with a desktop?
To me it's much like hopping my 75kg in a 2 tonnes car to
get some groceries. Moving around 2t for 75kg may be like 20
times more energy intensive than using a scooter.
Mihai
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