I don't don't understand what this thread is really about...If you want to test your Java Applications try JUnit. It's great for automated unit testing of your Java Applications and it's pretty simple to use. As for the IDE I would recommend Eclipse. It has a lot of pretty neat features, plus loads of plug-ins so you can easily extend its functionality, and already has a built in support for JUnit so you can do your unit tests easier. There are a lot of different distros of eclipse available but if you don't want to do much configuration I think EasyEclipse would be the one for you. You would need a machine with at least 512 MB of ram though. But I think that wouldn't be much of a problem nowadays.