Republished with Permission - Original Article

People often ask me at conferences for PC hardware recommendations.  Specifically - "what type of machine do you recommend I get for doing development with Visual Studio?" and/or "your laptop seems really fast, what type is it?"

Some of my recommendations on this topic are fairly standard and obvious: Ideally you want to get a duel core or better CPU.  I also always recommend getting at least 2GB or more of RAM. 

The recommendation I make that often seems to take people a little by surprise is to make sure you always get the fastest possible hard-drive when buying a new machine - and where necessary trade off purchasing additional CPU processor speed in favor of investing in a faster disk instead.