PDC Day minus one

PDC Day -1

A couple of months ago ZDNets editor Rupert Goodwins asked me if I'd like to go to Microsofts Professional Developer conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. PDC is a odd Microsoft conference in that it's a conference where Microsoft like to show some of the near future technologies. Often stuff shown at PDC doesn't get turned into a real product (or like Vista the vision originally shown is very different from that which ships). PDC also doesn't happen every year, sometimes Microsoft decideds there isn't really enough new stuff to show us.
This tends to mean that for your average developer PDC isn't always a no brainer of a conference to go to, often the TechEd conferences are a better value for money (and there is a european version) or perhaps MIX in Las Vegas is a better bet for those who are more web orientated.

This years PDC is looking pretty good. There is the big public Windows 7 launch happening and lots of interesting technologies relating to cloud based services seem to be coming. There are also the improvements to C# and by the looks of it some interesting parallel computing announcements being made. I've been tasked with trying to look fairly deeply into the internals of Windows particularly concentrating on whats new for developers.

My current work a day laptop is a Toshiba X200 with a 17" screen and weighs what feels like a ton (I work with body worn video for the police so I need something with some power), which makes the thought of shleping it around a conference all day a bit of a pain. However I'm now according to Uncle Sam and the Visa I had to get a "proper" journalist so a quick look at the market place to see which netbook format machine I'd like to take with me and a phone call later I've snaffled a very nice HP2133 to work with.

The HP2133 comes with SUSE linux enterprise desktop on it out of the box. In spite of my best efforts (by shrinking partitions) I couldn't persuade both Linux and Vista to work on the same hard disk. Sadly HP don't supply a rescue disk for SUSE install so I just plain gave up and installed Vista on half the hard disc leaving the other half available to possibly try a windows 7 install on (I'll find out over the week if this is possible). Since this is a Microsoft conference I couldn't go with a Linux only install.

In comparison to my original Asus 701 Eee (which I often take to conferences to take notes on) the HP feels much more solidly built and the keyboard is a much better experience. The real bonus is the screen which has a 1280 x 768 resolution and makes it actually possible to use the machine for development work in a modern IDE. While development on the Asus is possible it feels far to cramped on screen.

The HP2133 is a little underpowered for Vista with it Via C7 processor, but manages to support Aero Glass with feeling too sluggish. Out of the box the machine only had 1GB which seemed to result in a lot of swapping too and from the hard disc which really killed both the battery and my patience. I stole one of the 2GB SODIMMs out of my Toshiba and after fitting that performance seems to be usable. To be fair to HP they don't normally supply Vista with the 1GB machines only supplying Vista on the 1.4Ghz machines with 2GB of RAM.

Weight wise the HP seems to be about average for the 9-10" netbook market place and pretty much perfect for use at a conference, battery life does however seem to be a little on the short side with the standard 3 cell battery back (HP couldn't get me one with the six cell pack). If I get a chance while I'm out at PDC I'll see if I can find some users of the other machines (the Dell mini in particular intrigues me) that are available and ask for their thoughts.