Upgrading or selling my Dell D430 Business netbook?

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.

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.