As most people agree, encouraging developers to make  fast code by giving them slow machines is not a good idea. But there's a point in that question. My dev machine is fast, and so I  occasionally write code that's disturbingly inefficient, but that only becomes apparent when running it on other people's machines.What are some good ways to temporarily slow down a turbocharged dev machine? The notion of speed includes several factors, for example:CPU clock frequency.Amount of CPU cores.Amount of memory and processor cache.Speed of various buses.Disk I/O.GPU.etc.
How to slow down your computer (for testing purposes)?
efficiency
Run your tests in a virtual machine with limited memory and only one core.The old machines people still may have now are mostly Pentium 4 era things. That's not that unrealistic - I'm using one myself right now. Single core performance on many current PCs normally isn't that much better, and can be worse. RAM performance is more important than CPU performance for many things anyway, and by limiting a little more harshly than for an old 1GB P4, you compensate for that a bit.Failing that, if you're willing to spend a bit, buy a netbook. Run the tests on that.