New laptop!

I just got my new Dell D630 a few days ago, and it’s great.

I’ve been researching laptops for a couple of months before my trip to Vietnam, and this was the best laptop I found in Israel:

• 14.1” with a 1440x900 resolution!!! - I think this is one of the best things about it, now that I’ve been working with it a bit I don’t know why I even thought about 15” with 1280x800… that would have been a huge waste of screen space.
• Intel Core2 Duo T8300 – Good thing I waited until after the trip, because while I was away newer laptops got to Israel with the new 45nm technology.
• 160GB 7200rpm – I was a little conflicted about whether to get the laptop with a 7200rpm or a 5400rpm hard drive, due to heat and noise issues, but at the end I decided to go for the 7200rpm and I’m glad, it’s very quiet and stays rather cool.

I’m dual-booting it with XP Pro (It came pre-installed, part of the Vista Business downgrade-able license thing) and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

At the moment, I’m keeping XP, maybe somewhere in the future I’ll give Vista a chance.

My main OS is XP, Ubuntu is not enough for me at the moment (no Visual Studio, etc…) and I quite like XP, it’s stable, fast, I did some extreme-customization to make it fit me and it’s great.

I don’t know what will end up with Vista, but for now I’m happy with my XP.

The laptop does get a little hot, at a cooler weather it might be unnoticeable, but in this heat everything is too hot. To take care of this I bought a USB cooling pad with three fans that take the heat from the bottom and throw it out the back. Very useful little device, very quiet and keeps the laptop much cooler (also enables me to actually put it on my lap).