Dan's Adventure

On Saturday morning my Dell XPS M1330, which I have only had since last February, passed away. A failure of a component on the motherboard has resulted in a short circuit which prevents it from turning on. The cost of repairing it is ridiculous, as it is out of warranty, so I made the decision to replace it.

I have opted for something more suited to travelling, a Samsung NC10 netbook. Its quite a bit smaller than the M1330, 13″ vs 10″, about half the weight, and the battery life is several hours longer. It is however no where near as powerful. The M1330 had dual processors (2 at 2.2GHz) and 4GB RAM, the NC10 has an atom processor (1.6GHz) and 1GB RAM out the box. This is sufficient for everyday computer use (internet, music, word processing etc) but I need to use it for Java development too, which is very CPU and memory intensive. I have therefore upgraded the NC10 to the maximum of 2GB RAM using memory from the M1330.

I am happy to report that the NC10 is running Eclipse, MySQL and Tomcat quite happily. There is some slow down when building with Ant, deploying an application to Tomcat and when JSPs are being compiled, but other than that I’m pleased with the performance. One thing that will take some getting used to though is using Eclipse on the smaller screen. I wouldn’t want to use this for developing on full time, but for doing a bit here and there whilst travelling, this is perfect.