Get a tablet with a detachable keyboard/cover. A 10" unit can have a full HD display and will have about the same length/width as your netbook but will be thinner and lighter with better battery life. Get Windows 10 or Linux to run standard software. It will have an on-screen keyboard so you do not have to carry the mechanical keyboard if you do not expect serious text entry to be required. A true pen interface is very nice and necessary for graphic work but the display can be used at full resolution with an active touch-screen pen. Using a pen instead of a mouse or touchpad is a delight! A light glove makes it possible to rest your hand on the screen when using the pen. Search Amazon for "artist's half glove" to find ones made for the purpose but just about anything will do. Once we have better speech and handwriting recognition, the keyboard should no longer be necessary.
And SpaceshipOne was just a stunt, but it was the first step. SpaceshipTwo is the next step and it will get rich adventurers to pay for the development of SpaceshipThree which will be an orbital system. This kind of true spaceplane will eventually allow for much less expensive access to space than will be possible even with the reusable rockets which SpaceX is developing.
The Klipsch S-2 ($50 list, $25 - $40 street) are in-the-ear phones with good sound isolation and very good audio quality for the price. Like most of the less expensive phones, they are somewhat bass-heavy but not too bad in this regard and the actual bass extention is impressive. Midrange and treble are uneven but better than you usually get in this price range. They are sensitive enough to use with portable equipment. Wiring is kind of flimsy. If used in an active fashion, they are not likely to go much beyond the one-year waranty.
You really have to go to the Shure SE-215 ($150 list, $90 - $99 street) to get professional stage monitors with very flat frequency response, superb sound isolation, secure and comfortable fit, low listening fatigue and user-replaceable wires. These less expensive models do not reproduce extreme bass or extreme treble but they are very smooth within their range, say from 50 Hz to 12 KHz. They are sensitive enough to use with portable equipment.
Mike
The main requirement is enough RAM for two operating systems plus some extra for the virtualization system. The CPU is less important. I run Windows XP Pro as a virtual system on a Linux host with VMware Workstation 6. It is a 5-year-old Athlon 3000+ box with 1 GB of RAM. I allocate 512 MB to Windows, which is about the minimum for XP. Current Linux distributions need at least 256 MB and VMware is something of a memory hog itself so 1 GB is about the minimum RAM for this setup. Windows is perhaps just a smidgen slower than it would be if running natively on the same hardware but the difference is minimal. It does not have much effect on the speed of Linux apps running simultaneously. Things bog down fast if you try to run more than one virtual system simultaneously but VMware is good at using multiple processors for this. I did some work which involved running up to 6 instances of FreeBSD simultaneously on an 8-core Xeon system with 4 GB RAM. Up to 6 it did not slow down much. Over 6 it got sludgy.
Have fun!
Mike
The Cowon iAudio 7 is compact, rugged, has superb audio quality and outstanding battery life. It has excellent tone controls and supports Ogg and FLAC encoding as well as MP3 and WMA. It has an FM radio and can record. You should get better earphones to go with it and for travel, you can't beat a noise isolating type. The Shure SLC2 is a good match for it. These have near audiophile sound quality and sound isolation as good as the big, expensive noise canceling types. This combination is vastly superior to any iPod model and you can get much more substantial discounts.
http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/7/http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/PersonalMonitorSystems/us_pro_earphones_content
Happy Landings,
Mike
Borland's Delphi (Windows) and Kylix (Linux) is superior to Visual Studio/Visual C++ in most repects. They are full RAD systems with drag-and-drop interface builders and come with excellent compilers for both Object Pascal and C++. There are a large number of third-party component packages available for them. There is a free version of Kylix although they hide it pretty well on their web site. It is called "Open Edition" and you can get it here: http://www.borland.com/products/downloads/download _kylix.html.
Visual Slickedit is a very sophisticated text editor which turns any set of command line tools into a graphic IDE. It does not have an visual interface builder, however. Available for both Windows and Linux but no free version. It is well worth the price if you are programming at the professional level. http://www.slickedit.com/
Mike
Visual Slickedit is the best by far but you have to pay for it. I have used the Windows version professionally for decades and bought the Linux version when I got my first contract job using Linux. If you are doing serious programming, it is unbeatable. It is complicated enough to require some study to master it. It can be configured to work as a front-end for any command-line tools and the Linux version comes set up for all of the usual ones. It analyses program structure, parses compiler error messages and references them to the source text, etc. It does an excellent job of organizing large projects involving hundreds of files and many modules.
http://www.slickedit.com/
Mike
The disadvantages of a laptop are the cruddy keyboard and the fact that you can't get a cutting edge, gamer-grade video controller. The advantages are lower power and less space occupied although you can get close with a desktop. You can get a 12 volt power supply for a desktop although they are rather expensive. You can get slightly better performance in a desktop but the better the performance, the higher the power drain. You can get any accessories you need in PC card or USB peripherals but they may be slightly more expensive than PCI. Pick your poison!
Mike
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft "Surface Pro 4" but that is a 12" machine with a breath-taking price tag. Not a replacement for a "netbook".
Get a tablet with a detachable keyboard/cover. A 10" unit can have a full HD display and will have about the same length/width as your netbook but will be thinner and lighter with better battery life. Get Windows 10 or Linux to run standard software. It will have an on-screen keyboard so you do not have to carry the mechanical keyboard if you do not expect serious text entry to be required. A true pen interface is very nice and necessary for graphic work but the display can be used at full resolution with an active touch-screen pen. Using a pen instead of a mouse or touchpad is a delight! A light glove makes it possible to rest your hand on the screen when using the pen. Search Amazon for "artist's half glove" to find ones made for the purpose but just about anything will do. Once we have better speech and handwriting recognition, the keyboard should no longer be necessary.
And SpaceshipOne was just a stunt, but it was the first step. SpaceshipTwo is the next step and it will get rich adventurers to pay for the development of SpaceshipThree which will be an orbital system. This kind of true spaceplane will eventually allow for much less expensive access to space than will be possible even with the reusable rockets which SpaceX is developing.
The Klipsch S-2 ($50 list, $25 - $40 street) are in-the-ear phones with good sound isolation and very good audio quality for the price. Like most of the less expensive phones, they are somewhat bass-heavy but not too bad in this regard and the actual bass extention is impressive. Midrange and treble are uneven but better than you usually get in this price range. They are sensitive enough to use with portable equipment. Wiring is kind of flimsy. If used in an active fashion, they are not likely to go much beyond the one-year waranty. You really have to go to the Shure SE-215 ($150 list, $90 - $99 street) to get professional stage monitors with very flat frequency response, superb sound isolation, secure and comfortable fit, low listening fatigue and user-replaceable wires. These less expensive models do not reproduce extreme bass or extreme treble but they are very smooth within their range, say from 50 Hz to 12 KHz. They are sensitive enough to use with portable equipment. Mike
The main requirement is enough RAM for two operating systems plus some extra for the virtualization system. The CPU is less important. I run Windows XP Pro as a virtual system on a Linux host with VMware Workstation 6. It is a 5-year-old Athlon 3000+ box with 1 GB of RAM. I allocate 512 MB to Windows, which is about the minimum for XP. Current Linux distributions need at least 256 MB and VMware is something of a memory hog itself so 1 GB is about the minimum RAM for this setup. Windows is perhaps just a smidgen slower than it would be if running natively on the same hardware but the difference is minimal. It does not have much effect on the speed of Linux apps running simultaneously. Things bog down fast if you try to run more than one virtual system simultaneously but VMware is good at using multiple processors for this. I did some work which involved running up to 6 instances of FreeBSD simultaneously on an 8-core Xeon system with 4 GB RAM. Up to 6 it did not slow down much. Over 6 it got sludgy. Have fun! Mike
The Cowon iAudio 7 is compact, rugged, has superb audio quality and outstanding battery life. It has excellent tone controls and supports Ogg and FLAC encoding as well as MP3 and WMA. It has an FM radio and can record. You should get better earphones to go with it and for travel, you can't beat a noise isolating type. The Shure SLC2 is a good match for it. These have near audiophile sound quality and sound isolation as good as the big, expensive noise canceling types. This combination is vastly superior to any iPod model and you can get much more substantial discounts. http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/7/ http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/PersonalMonitorSystems/us_pro_earphones_content Happy Landings, Mike
Borland's Delphi (Windows) and Kylix (Linux) is superior to Visual Studio/Visual C++ in most repects. They are full RAD systems with drag-and-drop interface builders and come with excellent compilers for both Object Pascal and C++. There are a large number of third-party component packages available for them. There is a free version of Kylix although they hide it pretty well on their web site. It is called "Open Edition" and you can get it here: http://www.borland.com/products/downloads/download _kylix.html.
Visual Slickedit is a very sophisticated text editor which turns any set of command line tools into a graphic IDE. It does not have an visual interface builder, however. Available for both Windows and Linux but no free version. It is well worth the price if you are programming at the professional level. http://www.slickedit.com/
Mike
Visual Slickedit is the best by far but you have to pay for it. I have used the Windows version professionally for decades and bought the Linux version when I got my first contract job using Linux. If you are doing serious programming, it is unbeatable. It is complicated enough to require some study to master it. It can be configured to work as a front-end for any command-line tools and the Linux version comes set up for all of the usual ones. It analyses program structure, parses compiler error messages and references them to the source text, etc. It does an excellent job of organizing large projects involving hundreds of files and many modules. http://www.slickedit.com/ Mike
The disadvantages of a laptop are the cruddy keyboard and the fact that you can't get a cutting edge, gamer-grade video controller. The advantages are lower power and less space occupied although you can get close with a desktop. You can get a 12 volt power supply for a desktop although they are rather expensive. You can get slightly better performance in a desktop but the better the performance, the higher the power drain. You can get any accessories you need in PC card or USB peripherals but they may be slightly more expensive than PCI. Pick your poison! Mike