>>The fact that the world has all this amazing hardware, and this ten year old laptop works just fine makes me wonder what kind of racket IT professionals are pulling here.
>>
>>Why do you say "racket"?
>
>
>Its some kind of scam. 6GB of RAM for what?
>
>For no other reason to blow money and rare earth materials.

I agree, Mike.
I'm tired of getting the latest and greatest hardware and having to replace it in 4 years because the software I'm using is so inefficient.
In defense of VS, yes, it is clunky, but the IDE is really awesome.
However, I've been working with PHP/Eclipse and MySQL (all free) lately and they fly compared to the clunky, high-priced MS equivalents.
The Eclipse Intellisense is not as robust as VS', but it's pretty good, especially considering all the costs - HW and SW of VS.
Unfortunately, I have to go with the flow and I'll be getting new HW soon.