system requirements for Visual Studio 2010

Question

My team is currently using VS2005 with the following development PCs that are a few years old: XP, Pentium D 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM.

My gut tells me that this is going to be poor hardware for VS2010 development. I am not running VS2010 beta but I am running Blend 3 beta and the performance is bad.

Can you point me to anything that I can show my boss to convince him to buy 6 new machines for my team?

Edit below after initial answer from Jon:

I should have added that my boss wants to upgrade current machines with new hard-drives so I am trying to use this opportunity to take a look forward and see if a HD upgrade is really worth it. This HD upgrade would not just be simple installation of 2nd drive but would replace current drive and would involve backup/restore or reinstallation headaches. There would be the added benefit of 64bit development too, something that we have been talking about.

Answer 1

Betas typically are bad in terms of performance. I know that MS is working hard to improve the performance of VS2010.

However, I have the beta running on my Samsung NC-10 netbook, so it does work on low spec machines.

Do you already find yourself frequently waiting for your machine to catch up? If so, that's the reason to give your manager: you'll be more efficient now with a new machine. If not, wait until VS2010 is out and you actually have it installed (will you even upgrade immediately?) - then if it's too slow, you can show that to your manager at that point.

Speculatively requesting an upgrade doesn't sound like a good idea to me.