As I've mentioned before, I started my professional life as a biologist. Blame it on watching too many episodes of M.A.S.H. for giving me the idea that I wanted to be a surgeon. I won't waste a lot of time laying out my employment history. Suffice it to say that after various lab jobs in both industry and academia I made the career change to programming and have been content ever since. That was about three or four years ago. Currently I'm the sole programmer in a group working on a patient therapy and outcome registry at the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky. As the sole programmer I'm also the lead programmer, which is a lot like being the fastest banana slug.
As I also mentioned in my earlier post, I've decided to attempt something close to regular posts about what I do and how I do it. This is the first, and I'm starting off with a post about my equipment. I'm a laptop-based developer. I upgraded from a Dell Optiplex GX270 late last year to a Dell Precision M6300. I was a little wary at first about committing to a laptop, but so far so good. I've got a 17" screen, 4GB of RAM and a 2.6 GHz Core2 Duo processor. The graphics card is an nVidia Quadro FX 1600M with 256MB of RAM - more than enough for Aero (which I stopped using). I have a 5.1 Windows Experience score. The OS is 64-bit Windows Vista Enterprise. Over the past week I gave 64-bit Windows 2008 a try because I use a lot of virtual servers and this processor has the virtualization feature that works with Hyper-V. Ultimately though I returned to Vista. There is too much friction in daily use to make Windows 2008 worth it for me. In reloading my OS I remembered a major pitfall I first encountered getting a 64-bit OS working on this machine so I'm going to post my setup procedure here in case anyone else runs into the same issue I did. I'm also posting other apps and tweaks that I find useful.
The main problem I had during a 64-bit OS install on this machine is that I have to load the SATA driver for the hard disk before I load the OS. It took me a while to figure that out when I first got this machine (it came with 32-bit Vista Ultimate). I'd finish the OS load and on first reboot the thing would just sit there with a black screen and a flashing underscore in the top left corner. The hard drive driver is R154201. I unzip it in a directory on a USB stick for use in the install routine. Once the OS is loaded I install the chipset, and the Turbo Memory driver (version A02) then the Matrix Storage driver in that order. After that I just move through the rest as I come to them: Ethernet, WiFi, System Utilities, sound, graphics, and touchpad. The touchpad driver (R157048) is nice because it adds the horizontal and vertical scroll features for the edges of the touchpad.
Applications:
I also include the current releases of Visual Studio add-ons:
I used to install Microsearch Color Picker, but it won't install on 64-bit Vista.
For flexibility I keep my documents on an external hard drive (Iomega) along with backups of my virtual servers which I run off of my hard drive. I've tried running them off of an external drive but saw no real performance improvement since I'm using an external drive for Visual Studio solutions. I also have a seed virtual hard drive file for XP, Vista, and Windows 2003. If I kill one of my servers during an experiment I just delete it and make another copy of the hard drive seed. The mobility of a laptop combined with Virtual Servers means that I can do my job in the office or at home without interruption. The dual monitors (20" and 24") on my desk typically make the walk from the parking deck worth the effort though.
Other than this, all I really need to do my job is a network connection so that I can listen to Radio Paradise and a strong cup of coffee around noon.
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