Upgrading or selling my Dell D430 Business netbook?

Posted in Computer Hardware, Hackintosh, My Journey

Big deja-vu moment! 2.5 years ago, after buying a MSI Wind U100, only to be used as travelcompanion, I ended up migrating from a ‘kick ass’ workstation to a low end Intel Atom N270 netbook! Earlier this week same thing. Although I was in the planning phase of building a bigger and better Workstation. I suddenly found myself migrating from a dual screen desktop workstation to a recently bought 12″ Dell D430 ‘business netbook’ running Hackintosh! And was curious about a possible future upgrade path …

Although the D430 chipset supports up to 4GB RAM, the motherboard only support 1GB (onboard) + 1GB (expansion). Which is fine, but I did hope I could fit a Solid State Disk instead of the sluggish 4200rpm harddisk. Challenge being? It’s an older PATA harddrive! So not a S-ATA. But what’s worse, it uses a very rare ZIF socket. So a — for example — RunCore SSD will cost a small fortune! (at 27th of April did manage to get a SSD … but anyway …)

So my eye caught the Dell D620 and D630. Both models are a little bigger and heavier (2.27KG instead of 1.2KG), however the D6xx series does have a 14″ (instead of 12″) screen, built-in ODD, better batterylife, twice the amount of USB ports (4 instead of 2), and sporting a better CPU.

The D430 / D620 / D630 models most commonly used CPUs are U7600 1.2GHz / T2400 1.66GHz / T5500 1.66GHz / T7250 2GHz and score — according to CPUbenchmark.net — respectively 687 / 883 / 926 / 1102 points.

Meaning the D630 is faster than the D430, but has a similar price tag when bought second hand! But there’s more! Checkout the PDF spec sheet at Dell. The D6xx series has SATA instead of PATA harddrives, so it’s fairly easy to fit a Solid State Disk. Just a quick reminder how fast SSD drives are:

To get back to the topic title: Am I going to sell my barely 1 month old D430? Nope! It’s a definitely a keeper! But a second ‘hobby DELL’ is nice! Definitely the D630 with 4GB RAM and 30-120GB SSD.

Update June 2012:

Update 1st July 2012: D620 as part of my “Digital Nomad Virtual Office July 2012”, however it’s indeed going to be replaced by a D630 with 1440×900 resolution and 4GB of RAM preferably.