I wish I was in that situation... My work machine is a PII400 w/ 292Mb of RAM (of which 128Mb is part of my personal stash), and the last new system we shipped to a customer was a P4C2.6 w/ 512Mb of RAM.. It's depressing running the software I write on something so much faster than the PC it was developed on..
Seeing stuff that I'm used to waiting 30 seconds for, taking less than 5 seconds...
Actually I'm in a similar quandry myself.
Some of the systems that we're shipping are like I said, and with a whopping Matrox G400 graphics card and a slow CD burner.
However other systems that we're shipping now are 2.8GHz P4Bs with 1GB DDR333 on an 845 mobo with GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics cards and an HP 200i DVD burner! Yet I have to match our 'worst case customers', not our best.
And actually it kind of pisses me off too because my system is a P3 750 on a VIA mobo while our 'worst case customers' are getting P3 800s on a 440BX! Oh how I'd like that added stability <i>and</i> performance boost.
Plus I had to buy my own audio card because my PC didn't have any onboard audio. :\ I want my MP3s dammit! Heh heh.
Maybe I'll get lucky sooner or later though. My power supply's 12V line will every so often just dive for no reason and cause my system to crash. Normally that'd be a bad thing, but if it starts to happen more frequently then maybe I can finally win my argument to get my system replaced.
What I really need is a laptop though. You've no idea how much of a pain in the arse it is to lug my computer around from room to room (and up and down stairs at that) whenever I need to hook up to hardware in the labs in order to debug my software. :\ This whole 'matching our customer' thing really bites.
<A HREF="http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20031017" target="_new">Then what's your poison of choice?
Soymilk. I was raised on the stuff.
Ah. What's it made of?
Soy.
Is that soy as in soylent green?</A>