I like to have a decent machine for development, especially when running Visual Studio (which I do not use often, but Visual Studio is not exactly lightweight).

I like to have a decent machine for development, especially when running Visual Studio (which I do not use often, but Visual Studio is not exactly lightweight). But for testing I absolutely prefer to use a low-end machine. I used to have a SparcStation 20 at home (it died a few years ago, though), and I loved that machine for that precise reason. (Also: Big-endian vs. Little-endian issues) Damn, that beast was SLOW. Not just slow: It only had 64 MB of RAM, and I had removed the hard drive because it was way too loud, so the entire thing ran over the network. Swapping over a half-duplex 10MBit line makes you really think about memory usage. ;-)