I have a good friend who is a simulation engineer for integrated circuits (don't know his official job title, we work in different fields at different companies

I have a good friend who is a simulation engineer for integrated circuits (don't know his official job title, we work in different fields at different companies). He has the exact same setup as you and I've never once heard him complain about it. It's really interesting because even though we both work at desks on computers and both do system design and programming, he is so much less in tune with trends in his field. He VNC's to his graphic intensive simulation program on his crappy Win 7 laptop and gets stuff done. I complain if I can't run several VM's on my developer PC without noticing that they are there.