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Greenhorn
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Hey guys,

New to the java scene and this forum. From what I can tell this is going to be a priceless forum for me to come to with my java needs . I am starting to learn java to get my certification. I am currently making my way through the Head First Java book and when I have a couple bills saved up plan on paying the money and doing the classes on this forum. My question is (and if its in the wrong spot someone please advise where it would be better suited), im looking into a laptop so I can learn/write code anywhere instead of only at my house on the desktop. What are solid specs for a laptop, pretty much just processer and ram power, for someone looking to learn java and hopefully get certified and writing code. Is this something that requires a powerhouse machine or can I find a nice 700mhz ibook and work with that for a wihle until I perhaps find a job doing java???

thanks for all the help everyone,
cant wait to start posting my coding problems for you guys to school me on

boomer
 
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As long as you don't get smoke or small fragments of silicon out of the laptop when you power it up, you can use it for Java programming. I used to use a ThinkPad 570 with a 400MHz Pentium3 and 128MB RAM until about two years ago. It was slow, particularly when using an IDE, but still gave the results eventually.
 
Boomer Plemon
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Awesome ... thanks Campbell appreciate it.
 
Campbell Ritchie
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You're welcome and welcome to JavaRanch

I think this thread (if there are any more replies) would sit better on the general computing forum. Moving.
 
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Since you are just beginning, in my opinion, you should take the most basic route using a simple text editor.
That should not require a lot of processor and ram power. would run on as low as a celeron 300MHz, 128MB RAM.

But then, that's only an opinion.

Regards
 
Boomer Plemon
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thats definitely what i was lookin into, was something around the 500mhz range just cuz they can be had so cheap ... i was just concerned that ones i start righting code and actually designing stuff ... i wasnt sure what kind of resources would be used with gui and what not ... thats the only reason i was asking .... thanks for your valuable input Himanshu

Boomer
 
Himanshu Kansal
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My Pleasure Sir!
 
Campbell Ritchie
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And please avoid writing "cuz" or "lookin" (Cockneys are permitted the latter, however). Explanation here.

For a "simple" text editor (which I agree with) avoid NotePad; it has all sorts of annoying quirks making it a poor choice for programming. Try jEdit, NotePad2 or NotePad++ which are all a lot better; they support syntax highlighting and bracket matching too. My old laptop happily ran GUI stuff. Just slowly. Any PC will run the GUIs as long as it supports GUIs at all.
If you get a laptop like that with Windows on, you may end up with an old version of Windows; XP and Vista won't be happy with only 128MB RAM. Might be worth considering downloading the latest version of Ubuntu, partitioning the disk, and installing Linux too.
 
Boomer Plemon
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I saw somewhere about notepad 2 and downloaded it. Very nice program like you said helps me when closing brackets and the number lines when I throw errors I can go right back to em ... I highly doubt there is any difference but is there one os that is better than the others in regards to this stuff??? linux/xp/osx. I have a couple people im negotiating laptop prices with and have an ibook and 1.2ghz windows machine. Obviously linux can go on either. I just wonder do you guys recommend a certiant os??? thanks again for all the help guys.


boomer
 
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No its not certain to any OS, choose anyone of your choice, but with low memory and/or cpu unix/linux system would do better in overall performance, but again nothing to do with Java and development .
 
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