I mentioned in an earlier post that Visual Studio 2005 was gradually becoming more responsive as the error count decreased.

On my system, which is a Pentium D 2.66 GHz with 1GB of RAM, it starts becoming usable again at about 22,000 errors (we’re at 22,267 now).  That’s where the “type-a-character-and-wait” transitions into using the application in realtime.

One thing to keep in mind is that I have a trial installation of ReSharper (which I’ll post about once I’ve had more chance to evaluate), which slows things down considerably due to constant recompiling to find errors in realtime and excessive intellisense-ing above and beyond that which Visual Studio does.  Without Resharper I think I would have noticed responsiveness a bit earlier, but for now I have to say that 22,000 errors should be considered the upper limit of usability in a system like mine.

With more RAM it would probably be a bit better, and at this point it probably makes sense to upgrade to 2GB (RAM’s gone down quite a bit recently, probably due to Vista finally starting to sell).  I’ll have to add that to my grocery list.