Forte and Netbeans are now one product owned by Sun (called Forte for Java). Sun sees it as becoming the standard IDE for Java development. We use it here at work, and it''s a very nice tool. It does use resources, though. Our systems all have 256MB of RAM and dual PIII 450MHz processors, running either Windows NT4 or Windows 2000.

If you try running it on a single processor system, Forte definitely slows down considerably. But on our systems, it runs just fine -- no complaints.

Best part about it is that the Community edition is free, yet it''s a full-featured IDE with pluggable JDK support, a built-in debugger, a nice project & file management scheme, and an excellent updating mechanism.

You can find out more about it (& download it) here:

http://www.sun.com/forte/ffj/ce/index.html

I don''t use an IDE at the moment (I suppose I will need one once I begin working on large projects), so if all you really need to do is not have to fool with DOS then check out Ultra Edit. It''s basically a beefed up notepad that''s designed for programmers and web coders. It supports syntax coloring for any language because you just feed it a word list (and there''s hundreds for literally every programming/scripting language out there) and a bunch of other stuff and you can have it run DOS commands on your files, and when I type in java functions it can figure out what my functions are and creates a function list in a small window and. I have it set up so all I have to do is push one of two buttons and it''ll either compile the code or execute it.

More RAM will definitely help. It''s free, so download it & give it a shot. I would also recommend using Windows NT4 or Windows 2000 as opposed to any Windows 9X variant, it''ll be much more stable. On the other hand, since Forte''s written in Java, you could run it on Linux, too... haven''t ever tried that.