Posted on 10/27/2009 9:53:03 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Is is a good machine to send your college student off with so they were bought before school started and now simply slowed.
They are nice machines for the price.
Netbooks are wonderful to use to take it on the road for email or websurfing. Even nice around the house to lounge on the couch with while watching TV. Most laptops feel more like desktops. Certainly for gaming or some application where a bigger screen size is desirable, use something else. But for most people, 90% of their activity is websurfing.
The net book stuff was nothing more than a sells gimmick, many of those that bought them did so to keep up with the Jones. Lots of the hardly used turn up on ebay.
My husband got one on a whim at the same time he bought a cheap laptop to replace a 5 year old one that was crashing on him. He liked the little one so well, especially for traveling, that it was a couple of months before he opened the box of the full size lap top. Months later he discovered that there was a 9 hour battery model, gave the old one to me, and got the 9 hour one. When we have traveled places where we will be on the go, these little computers are great. For example, we were in England last spring. The intercity trains had free wifi available. We could hop on the train and Freep as we traveled! We were also able to Skype with my daughter instead of paying expensive cell phone rates. Two fit easily in the space of one laptop in my husband’s computer case. I can also carry it around in my purse if I need to. The screen is smaller, so that can be an issue at times. We bought an external CD drive for software installations.
A netbook is a good second computer for taking on the road, but the small screen and keyboard would be a pain (literally) if it was your main machine.
I tend to think that my choice to have a powerful laptop for the main computer is needless, since the netbook is the only one that goes anywhere.
thanks, bfl
I’m thinking about getting a netbook. I’ve downloaded a lot of public domain pdfs to my desk top, then transferred them to my lap top for “lying on the sofa” reading. The big keyboard makes the laptop a bit of a pain, but the page up/page down loading is so much faster than what I’ve seen on e readers, plus the largest e reader screen I’ve seen is still an inch smaller than the net book screen(kindle DX, and it’s more expensive than a netbook too). I’d need a kindle or nook for downloading purchased books, but my preferred reading at the moment is 18th and 19th century mythology and folklore-there are hundreds of free pdfs available online from various sites. Kindle and Nook *can* handle pdfs, but it takes downloading a program for kindle, looks like Nook is set up already via B&N’s free titles. Anyhoo, getting a netbook just for pdfs seemed a good alternative to an e reader, and less of a PITA than a full sized laptop. Has anyone else used a netbook this way, and how’s it working out?
Yep.
I use my HP DV6000 with Ubuntu at home, but take the Acer when I go out the door.
I have converted the netbook to an ultraportable by putting Ubuntu on it. It can do just about anything that my HP can do, except burn DVDs.
Performance is a tick slower, but being able to carry a laptop without anyone knowing you’re carrying a laptop is nice.
The first Netbooks were built on the theory that everything you needed was in the internet “cloud” so all you needed was taday’s version of a portable dumb terminal. So they had solid state storage and often used same flavor of Linux as OS.
Then people wanted a mini notebook so we saw XP, hard drives etc appear.
I bought a refurb Acer Aspire-1 for under $200 and it’s great on the road, full XP and 120GB hard drive; with a nine cell battery it’ll go seven hours or so, and it’s small and light weight, only 9” screen but it’s very sharp and bright.
bump
I miss my high bandwidth desktop machines with fast data buses, fast video and large memory. A netbook will get support my needs in a meager fashion, but wastes much time with the device totally saturated with CPU and disk traffic. There is simply insufficient processing margin for doing real work.
They’re kind of neat for surfing on the road; getting web mail, things like that. You won’t be editing videos or running CAD software.
My biggest complaint was lack of a DVD or CD reader so you have to hook it up to your network and share a drive to install apps. Still, pretty cool for what it is now that I’m stuck supporting my wife’s.
My service runs about $70. a month. That includes a limited voice, unlimited data and no particular plan for sms or mms. With unlimited data sms and mms are not that important at all. I figured that was pretty cheap to have a cell phone and just about any of the capabilities I’d want from a netbook (writing stories for my website, listening to music and podcasts, streaming audio, youtube, keeping up with Free Republic, Sirius, email, web browsing etc). Its a good fit for me . . . of course I shouldn’t paint with such a broad brush and say it is a good fit for everyone.
PS- Can you run voip over your netbook? Now that could be a real game changer.
I don’t know about voip- I’m not sure how well it would handle it. Your plan doesn’t sound bad at all. Something comparable here would have been $15 to $25 more. A couple months after I went with the local provider my company started paying my mobile plan so I was suddenly down to $20 a month total. One of the drawbacks is that it is only 1Mbps so video is not good. I’d still like to small form factor of a phone for audio streaming but I think I’d tend to do more surfing and iTunes with my netbook.
Keyboards are too small, otherwise I’d have had one a couple of years ago when you first pointed out that Asus EEE or whatever it was called. :’)
The EEE PC 700 (7" screen -- unnngh) is crazy small, with a keyboard to match, but I found that it travels well.
Just don't try to compose the next Great American Novel on it.
For such a tiny laptop, this thing really latches onto an 802.11x wireless signal.
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