I hope this is a joke. I am a J2EE and ASP.NET developer and I can assure you, that Visual Studio is a bug pested featureless IDE placebo. Code navigation is nearly nonexistent, Refactorings are poor, code completion is incomplete, versioning control support for SVN is a joke, it likes to freeze and eats memory like I eat chocolate (actually I sniff up chocolate). Basically I think it’s unusable without the resharper plugin, at least if you are used to the comfort of java IDEs.
I don’t know on what experience you base this statement, but I think java IDEs are quite good and powerful. Maybe the power unfolds not until you have a large project with multiple develpers and daily refactoring needs.
Buy a faster PC Sorry, just joking.
Unfortunately IDEs for all languages tend to eat up memory. Take for example Visual Studio: it’s no problem for VS eating up 1.5G of ram, just for not autoclosing opened editor tabs. Regarding speed: I think todays java-IDEs are fast enough and not noticable slower than other multi-tab editors. There are occasionally freezes with most of them, which result IMHO from garbage collection or indexing of new sources. The first can be overcome by proper heap space and maybe garbage collection settings while the second opens up features, normal editors are not capable of and are desperately needed in larger projects.
Take a look at Intellij Idea. It’s not native, but it’s quite fast and has some outstanding productivity improvement features. But it’s commercial and you need to really try it out. I use it for 5 years now and I consistently found useful features by mistyping key strokes per accident til last year