I finally broke down and bought a new development PC. And to those who read my post on how my hard drive blew on my last PC twice, in addition to backups I got a RAID 1 array in this PC. But the coolest part of this story is how fast I can load projects, develop, and make builds with the new dual core processor. [:D] Even with loading a project with ReSharper (which is a very slow loading tool) Visual Studio.NET loads my project quickly. I bought a 3ghz dual core processor (not Extreme Edition, didn't have the cash for that). I would not have thought the dual core would have sped things up so much because it is not really multi tasking much in development, but it did make a big difference for me. It is probably because my PC also does a lot of oother things at the same time (web surfing, SQL Server jobs, serves ASP.NET pages, and some multimedia. My wife laughs at me because the PC is never fast enough. Frankly I don't know exactly why it is so much faster, but I am thrilled that it is!
I'll be running some tests to see how things compare against benchmarks I ran on my former development PC over the next few weeks. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.
Of course, I had to go buy a new PC game to see how it works in a dual processor environment too. So I picked up a role playing game called Dungeon Siege 2 last night. I am not much of a gamer because frankly I don't ever find the time. But I am deterined to give this one a shot. I'll post more on that experience later.