You don't need top-notch PC to do development with Visual Studio and pretty much anything else — the requirements are quite modest compared to high-spec PCs. Take a look at Microsoft specifications:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/ultimate/system-requirements[
^].
Perhaps it's not good to work too close to the required minimum. You can bravely increase RAM requirements by the factor of two and disk space requirements by two orders of magnitude, but you won't really need to have faster CPU or HD drive. Even if you boost up the requirements this way, and it would be more then enough to use Visual Studio without any limitations, your specs would still remain quite modest.
Easy, isn't it? This days, creative works do not impose too difficult requirements for resource; and much more resources are used by do-nothing guys like those who play games all the time.
—SA