[defdac]

What I find interesting is that the best programmers among my friends usually have very outdated systems. They can do anything with a computer and can afford top of the line stuff, and still have over 5 year old hardware.

I was like that too and then got a fairly high end laptop with a fast 7200 rpm harddrive and 4 gigs of RAM which made the concept of "swaptime" when booting up my programming environment or compiling or doing both programming, music and graphics - a mere memory.

I've never been more creative.

[heresy]

My 3 year old MacBook Pro with an SSD runs circles around my girlfriend's 2 month old version with a 7200 RPM drive.

Ditch the 7200RPM, get an SSD.

It is that big a difference.

[th0ma5]

i don't think i've ever ran out of ideas of things i wanted to do with a machine. i still have Commodore 64's Gary Kitchen's Game Maker project ideas, and i haven't messed with that in 20 years... i've always been on the software side of things perhaps, and besides doing too many different kinds of things at once which really require different, dedicated machines, i don't think i've ever used a machine to its fullest potential