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