Generous budget: what's your ideal setup?

Question

If you had a generous, but not ridiculous budget (ie no yachts!), describe your ideal setup for programming.

What hardware would you have? Desktop and a laptop or just one or the other? How many screens - two, three, four, more?

Private office, work from home, cubicle?

What operating system(s) would you be using?

What tools would you have - IDE, other tools, databases, VCS, documentation?

What local development and test servers and other services would you want - VCS server? Build server? database server?

Answer 1

Computer: desktop

• Core i7 proc
• 12+GB ram
• Scream fast SSD
• 4 monitors (and video card(s) to match)
• Apple keyboard, and MS Arc mouse
• Win 7

Workstation: office

• The most comfortable chair money can buy
• A custom desk to suite my needs
• Hire a decorator to make it awesome
• A nice leather couch for relaxing
• An entire wall of whiteboards

Software: MS stack

• VS10 ultimate
• TFS to match
• .net Memory profiler
• Reflector Pro
• Some kind of VM manger so I can easily spin up VM's and tear them down

and last, but not least... Hire Jon Skeet as a personal mentor :)

Answer 2

I've just spec'd out my new workstation and shared it on newegg but it's not on the public viewable list yet. Here are the specs

• Intel Core i7 2600K (new Sandy Bridge architecture and built for over-clocking, Quad core with HyperThreading for 8 logical cores, and turbo-boost for 3.8GHz)
• Gigabyte Motherboard
• 16 GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 RAM
• Intel X25 120GB SSD
• 2 Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 RPM drives (RAID 0)
• Zotac GTX 460 Video Card (supports three monitors on one card)
• Blu-Ray Burner (read and write all known media)
• HP 21" Touchscreen (for multi-touch development)
• Two Asus 24" Widescreens
• Antec Mid Tower Case
• Corsair 750W power supply

(total cost around 2500)

For the workstation I'll be running Windows Server 2008 R2 converted to run as a workstation with Hyper-V for virtualization. (I have System Center Virtual Machine Manager which allows simple deployment of VMs to my workstation or any of my Hyper-V servers on the network).

Dev Tools

• VS2010 Ultimate
• Resharper 5
• Mercurial for DVCS
• Telerik Ultimate Collection (best .NET tools out there hands down)

Team Collaboration

• Microsoft Communications Server (Now Lync Server) for telepresence and conferencing
• TFS Server 2010 for project/change management (looking into doing something similar to git-tfs but for mercurial)

Misc

• Kindle and around $100/week for work-related book purchases (The cool thing is that you connect 5 devices to the same account so you can have a pool of kindles that can be checked out, or you can use the Kindle desktop app as well).
• Safari books online 10 shelf subscription (for those books that haven't made it to kindle yet).
• If you build commercial packaged or SAAS software and qualify, join BizSpark and you receive 3 VS2010 Ultimate with MSDN licenses as well as some internal use licenses for Windows, Exchange, and SQL for running your company.
• This setup will allow your developers to telecommute or work in office depending on your preference.