It never ceases to amaze me the way in which management budget holders will cut of their nose to spite their face when it comes to investing in developer's workstations. I'm constantly going into companies where every techie from their top developers (who like to call themselves 'Architects' but that's for another post) to their junior programmers are slaving away on some Pentium 3 piece of crap with less than 2GB of RAM.Often I sit with these people to do some pairing or mentoring and it is painful in the extreme. Start the database, start the application server, start the IDE and before long the pitiful machine is having trouble rendering the screen let alone compiling the source code. Throw in an on access scanner for viruses and the machine is virtually useless (I say virtually because they would be perfectly effective for use by Word jockeys such as the management and procurement drones who insist that developers use these underpower machines).So how much time is wasted by using sub par machines? Having timed myself working on a rubbish desktop for an entire week (Pentium 4 1.8GHz /w 768MB of RAM) and added up the time I have had to wait for things like the screen to render, windows to minimise, for the mouse cursor to react I can give the figure as 45%. That is 45% of my time is spent waiting for the machine to give me back control plus the extra time it takes to do things such as long compile cycles. It doesn't include the time wasted because I forgot what I was doing because the machine locked up or took 5 mins to do a task that would take 10 seconds on a modern machine.So forget how much I'm paid, because I'm not telling you, but I happen to know the going rate for a very junior developer is around 50,000 USD (40,000 EUR or 30,000 GBP). Therefore we have a loss of 11,250 USD... 11,250 USD per year!.How much does a decent developer machine cost? Not much more that 3,000 USD for a dual core 3.75GHz with 4GB of memory and an 300GB hard disk. Therefore buy the decent machine actually makes a saving of 8,250 USD per year.However managers get patted on the back for not spending money. And the last thing they want is things to get complicated, like doing ROI and making investments, as they get a little confused and so does their boss and that's why techies very rarely get suitable machines.