Tips for Programming with a low end PC.

DISCLAIMER: The term low-end is subjective, this is intended to help anyone with a less than powerful pc.

For the past few months I've been using a laptop with 4 GB RAM for working, learning and just about everything. My experience plus this twitter thread by Brad Traversy (Who is a great teacher btw) sort of inspired me to write this. Turns out that there are LOTS of developers with high end PC's but also lots of developers with arguably low end one's as well.

If you were just starting out or even a professional programmer, you'd imagine you'd need a lot of stuff. If you ever have to, it's 100% possible to code with a low end PC.

NOTE: Most of this applies to web application development. If you are developing games or training machine learning models locally then idk man, hopefully someone in the comments can help. (although i know google colab works for machine learning)

The Editor

Programming largely involves typing text and hoping the text makes sense to the computer, preferably with tools that make this easier. Most full on IDE's take up lots of RAM, which is a resource we can't really spare especially when you have other things open like several browser tabs.

The solution: A code editor, not an IDE (anti-climactic, I know.)

Local Editors's

Visual Studio Code

This is a very popular code editor that is "IDE like", it's lovely. Although a computer with around 2-4GB of RAM can run it. It isn't exactly known for being conservative with RAM. Here are some things you can do:

Tip 1: Disable unnecessary extensions!

I used to have some extensions on that weren't exactly relevant to what I was doing. Disabling them will should reduce the memory footprint of VSCode. You can find out how to do this here. After my research, this really is one of the best approaches when using VSCode.

Excluding files from filewatcher

You can stop VSCode from "watching"/tracking certain files for changes. You can do this in your VSCode settings . By default it has stuff like node_modules and git objects excludes but you can use a glob pattern (A useful guide on them) of file paths to add any thing else there.

"files.watcherExclude": {
    "**/.git/objects/**": true,
    "**/node_modules/**": true,
//Add in your other glob patterns
}

A few people have suggested sublime text so you can give that a try.

This is all great. However, If you have even lower specs or are working on a somewhat larger project, your PC may start to struggle if you have other things open. So switching to an even lighter editor would help. There are many great ones: some suggestions are Notepad ++ OR VIM.

Regarding something like VIM, while it is really lightweight, it takes sometime to get really good/efficient. Once you do learn, it is really nice not having to touch your mouse as much. Also when you code it makes you look like every non-programmer's idea of a programmer.

Upside is you don't have to touch your mouse as much, The downside is that you have to learn vim :*

Another Solution: Online IDE's

Here is another avenue that is great for several purposes. Online IDE's are pretty nice now. This especially true if you develop with many programming languages (Like PHP) and can't be bothered to setup a local dev environment. You also get the freedom to write code on anything with an internet connection.

They also happen to be pretty great for sharing code and working with other people quickly. Most computers have some browser and that's all you need.

There are a few options: Repl.it from my personal experience is pretty amazing, they support so many languages and allow you to run code and use a custom domain for your work. Plus multiplayer!

Codepen is another option which is pretty popular for sharing HTML./CSS/JS code, I used it a lot when I first started out with web dev about 3-ish years ago. There is also Codesandbox, which looks good, it appears to be a VSCode editor in the browser.

(I may be missing a few other good online editors but these one's are top of mind)

Extra Tools/Tips

Storage

Many low end PCs are at times plagued with low storage space. The best advice I have here is to only store projects you work on 24/7 on your machine, instead just commit the files to git and push to a hosted or self-hosted repository.

Chrome Extensions

The Great Suspender

While I did mention keeping extension/plugins to the absolute minimum. Because programming often involves a lot of open browser tabs (Which you will most likely hoard or forget to close). I recommend this extension.

Like the name suggests, it suspends idle tabs (you can configure how it works and exclude certain tabs based on some features).

An adblocker (ublock Origin)

I think most people who work anywhere near tech already have this. If you don't many sites loading trackers can have an impact on browsing speed. So this comes in handy.

Browsers & Browser Windows

Although I can't really give you the textbook explanation. One thing I do is work in a window where I am not logged in to anything. Not only does this help productivity but generally it makes my browser run faster, even searching stuff gets faster as well (my guess is that over-personalization can make things sluggish).

Final Thoughts

When you think about it most people who actually use what you make may not be on the best computers in the world so I guess you get to live their experience and avoid unnecessary fluff.

Whenever you are able to, upgrade your computer! it'll probably be a decent investment. From my experience the most important specs are RAM and SSD.

There are probably a million more little things you can do to make your computer more efficient. If you have any other tips, please leave a comment . I can edit the post and cite you :)

Original Blog: https://tobenxe.com/tips-for-programming-with-a-low-end-pc/

If you enjoyed the post you can follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/tobenxe/

Thanks for reading.

Comments

[heytuilip]

If you have a low end PC/laptop, use a very lightweight Linux distro like Arch Linux with a very lightweight WM like BSPWM and use Sublime Text and Qutebrowser for stuff like searching Google but don't make Qutebrowser your primary browser because it lacks features that are sometimes necessary.

I had a 10 year old laptop and I used the stuff I metioned above and even in 2GB RAM, it worked fine!

[0100110101]

What can i build in low end laptop with Spec Intel i3 4300,hdd 128, grapic card Intel hd,ram 4gb,what can i build with that Spec in 2021(in programming)

[brandon_wallace]

7 years ago I bought a $160 US dollar computer with a Intel Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM, and a weird version of Windows that only lets you open one application at a time. Before buying it, I said to myself "There is no way a computer this cheap this computer will run". I took a chance and bought it anyway. I installed Linux immediately without even booting into Windows. It runs beautifully. I have added a stick of RAM to it. 7 years later I am still using it.

[Tomi Adenekan]

If you have a low end chromebook. (speaking to myself) with 4 gigs of ram, 16 gigs of storage and Intel Celeron. You need some help (speaking to myself again). Here are some tips:

• Use galliumos. GalliumOS is a light Ubuntu based distro with XFCE4 (around 2 gigs burn to bootable USB)

• Continually clear your cache. Storage caches cause a lot of pain and sorrow because they are usually hard to find and separate from the important stuff (I'm looking at you Google). Clearing the caches usually will save your dying storage.

• Use the terminal. The terminal is the one app that can do it all. It has a web browser (lynx, I wouldn't use it though), a text editor, (vim, nano, emacs), a file manager (I don't need to explain this one). A system monitor (top, htop, dmesg). Multiple programming languages (python and Perl usually come default installed on the system).

• One app at a time, the tiny RAM won't be able to multitask at all, especially when running electron apps like vscode.

• Avoid Google chrome, it may be hard to do that on a chrome book 😂. Google chrome and RAM are like mouth and food. One eats the other. Try Microsoft Edge (dev for linux) or Firefox.

• Get a new computer as soon as possible. As you get better at programming, there will be more advanced tooling that will take up more memory, space, and processing power. I am at that spot right now and things are getting tough. (I'm getting a new one this month though).

Sorry if this was kind of long. Happy coding 😀.

[Pontakorn Paesaeng]

I have 4GB desktop at home. I cannot run Windows effectively. Also the Window is pirated, so I got rid of it.

I use Manjaro Linux. I want to try Arch but I still need a ready to use distro. XFCE is ideal desktop environment. I also combine it with OpenBox.

Main editor is Code OSS (VSCode Clone without tracker). I also use NeoVim.

[Ali Sherief]

I noticed that Codesandbox uses a lot of memory when you open a project, and that can finish a lower end PC's memory pretty fast. So better to use repl.it or stackblitz or one of the other alternatives.

[guy cherubin]

I am currently using a 4GB ram and AMD E1 CPU laptop..I installed vim and customized it and i found it to be great

[Jan Wedel]

At home, I still have a 2012 MacBook Pro upgraded to 4GB RAM and SSD.

I think it also depends what you are building, although you did not state it in your article AFAIK, I think you assume frontend development.

This is actually a resource killer when running chrome and maybe even compiling a typescript SPA, running Karma and Cypress.

But when it comes to backend development (eg Java), it is possible with significantly less resources.

And regarding the IDE: I still run the latest IntelliJ on my old Mac, both for frontend and backend. IntelliJ has its indexing magic, it takes considerable amount of CPU when starting, but afterwards it runs pretty snappy.

[Eny 🍀 (Tarun Aditya)]

For any low-end PCs (like the one I have), I would personally recommend using the New Microsoft Edge browser since, (I don't know how) it uses so much lesser memory than Google Chrome Browser despite BOTH the browsers being based on the same Chromium codebase and having all the same features (edge has one or two extra super-awsome features like "collections"). (I'm sure MSEdge uses memory tweaks under the hood).
I have seen edge use, less than half the RAM chrome uses.
Now, don't say I am an MSEdge fan. cuz I am! 😂

[Uchena Miller]

The Ide is better for clean codes and programmer productivity.. so I don't suggest going lower than sublime text or brackets. I use Vscode send I put it in top tier among other editors I've used before..your right about disabling unused extensions. It helps ram. I'm using a low and pc so I can relate but at the same time I need better productivity