I’m thinking of moving to Visual Studio 2008. But I’m using a Lenovo notebook PC that uses a Intel Core2 Duo CPU running at 1.5ghz, and VS2008 specifies a minimum of 1.6ghz. Could this work, or will I soon be looking for a new PC?
Any thoughts on VS2008 vs 2005 would also be welcome. Note that I’m hoping to stick with WinXP for a while yet.
It is asking for a 1.6 GHz single core processor, from the last-generation Pentium 4 processors.
You’re more than qualified 
Even if you had a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, the program should install and run fine… it would just be a tad on the slow side.
I don’t see in those specs anything distinguishing signle vs multi-core processors.
The sad fact is that 1.6 GHz is the minumum, and 2.2 is the recommended speed. I’m sure the app will be functional on your 1.5, but you’ll be itching to buy a new computer pretty soon. Also, you probably do not have a 7200 rpm drive in that laptop, so disk access may be a trouble spot.
I just had a look at Visual Studio - I thought it was a video editing app…couldn’t be much father wrong there. <blush> The current specs are for a minimum 2.2 GHz processor, and recommend a 2.6, so you’ll be absolutely miserable trying to run it on that laptop.
Anecdotally, I run VS2005 in a virtual machine, where the VM files are on an external USB drive, and it runs pretty ok. With 512 MB devoted to the VM, and I have not felt the need to increase that. I do asp .net projects in it (database server in a separate machine).
I think part of the reason why this setup works is because the VM is a very clean XP installation, with very little crap installed in it besides my dev tools.
The VM host is a laptop with a 2Ghz AMD Turion 64 X2 processor. 4GB ram.
If you are a C# or .NET user, I think VS 2008 add some pretty cool stuff to Generics as well as extension methods (being able to add methods to a class definition without changing it at all, by creating a new proxy class).
I’ve generally found that, for software, the minimum specs are the absolute, rock-bottom, bare-bones minimum required to just get the program to actually run. You won’t be able to actually use it until you get somewhere close to the recommended specs.
But the single-core/dual-core issue may make up for it.