Help me, hivemind!

[sabotabby]

A bunch of you have netbooks. What do you recommend? I want to get one for my eventual travels: Light, durable, and as powerful as possible within those constraints.

Comments

[corwin77.livejournal.com]

I like my lil netbook. It is powerful enough, the only complaint I have is that sometimes watching movies and such I get lag, especially with high def. stuff.

[sabotabby]

Make & model?

[corwin77.livejournal.com]

An Acer Aspire. I think it is a 1. It is the smallest model and doesn't have a cd drive.

[roter-terror.livejournal.com]

I also an have an Acer Aspire One. I love it. It's plenty fast, reliable, and so far it's been indestructible. I've dropped it a few times and it doesn't care.

[secretsoflife.livejournal.com]

to make video run awesome on windows netbooks: make sure you're running flash 10 (beta? alpha? who knows) and spend the $13 on the CoreAVC codecs: http://corecodec.com/products/coreavc

no moar jitters :)

the same applies if you're running Linux, but it's a bit of a process to get the codecs working on there.

[gillen.livejournal.com]

An Acer Aspire One. I've had two now (the first one I lost) and they're hyper-reliable light and convenient beasties.

Here's a random unboxing video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoKJjMa8EsI

[esizzle.livejournal.com]

depends on the budget
if u are lookin for soemthing cheap, get the acers and then by the time they warranty runs out and they break, u can get a another one cuz they are cheap enuff

if u have the budget for something pricier, i have a dell mini10 that is wroking out pretty nicely. and i've heard good things about the eee

if u are just using it for internet..microsoft office..etc then u might as well get the ubuntu operating system instead of windows, the performance is better and the interface is not too different. if u are using more complex applications (like photoshop or something) then stay with Windows if u don't want to learn ubuntu.

[esizzle.livejournal.com]

also you'll wanna backup all your data on those things, so if u don't have existing backup procedures in place, u'll wanna account for it in your budget..like if u need to buy an external hard drive or some USB keys or something...

[sabotabby]

Oh, I back up everything. External hard drive for Mac the Knife, USB keys for everything else.

[secretsoflife.livejournal.com]

for stuff that you are ok with being stored in the ol US of A, dropbox.com is also very nice.

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

if u are just using it for internet..microsoft office..etc then u might as well get the ubuntu operating system instead of windows, the performance is better and the interface is not too different.

I actually found the interface (at least on the netbook remix) to be more Mac-like than Windows-like, but that was a plus from my perspective. :-)

And I was surprised to find the learning curve really minimal - it was very, very easy to get used to. Most programs work pretty much exactly like their Mac or Windows equivalents, and anything that didn't was fairly self-explanatory. Also, the installer was a thing of beauty - really easy, streamlined, intuitive, fully explained any decisions I needed to make, and pretty to look at as well.

[roter-terror.livejournal.com]

Where do you get the idea that a Dell Mini is more reliable than an Acer Aspire One? My track record with Dell tells me that Dell is shit, while my AA0 hasn't had a single problem.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, we have Dells at work. Granted, they're being abused by children all day, but I still think they're shit.

[esizzle.livejournal.com]

out of 5 aspire ones i bought last year 2 had to be taken back for warranty. i have like 3 dell laptops that accumulated over the past 10 years and they all still run. with technology usually there's a reason between price differences.

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

I have a MSI Wind, model U123, and I'm quite happy with it. It's not totally top-of-the-line or anything, but thus far it's done everything I want it to quite nicely, the battery life is good, it's nice and compact, and seems just generally well-behaved.

Also, not sure if this is relevant to your needs, but installing Ubuntu Linux (specifically the Netbook Remix of it) on it was totally easy, once I figured out the trick of how to (a) make a bootable USB drive from the Windows side (it came with Windows XP), and (b) convince it to actually boot from said drive (which came down to timing). Ever since then, all has been good. I kept the original Windows install on a small partition, mainly for testing web sites in IE, but I use Ubuntu as my primary OS on the netbook.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

I do not recommend MSI Wind as a brand (I own a U100). The keyboard design is awkward and the preinstalled drivers often have bizarre incompatibilities... not designed really for an optimal end-user experience. And the warranty support is quite badly managed. I had to pay my own way to ship my netbook to Markham for battery repair, and then when they returned it the mouse key was broken and had to be reshipped a second time.

I'm not a giant Dell fan but at least with them you know what you're getting :) Acer is mentioned here too and they're pretty solid. And Asus pretty much pioneered this form factor before the other manufacturers got into it.

Check out pricecanada.com if you have any particular model in mind and want to compare prices. All the vendors on that site are Canadian or priced in Canadian dollars.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I was about to recommend mine, which is a gateway lt3100, and has an AMD athlon instead of an Intel atom, but it looks like it's been discontinued. They only sold it at best buy. But maybe there are some reconditioned or used.

I think there might still be one or two netbooks with the athlon or the athlon neo, which offers a pretty substantial performance improvement over any of the atoms. I never get video lag, for instance; the performance is so close to a full-size laptop that I use this computer all the time now and don't even bother with any of the others. But they're more expensive - up to $400 - and the battery life is usually worse. I wouldn't buy one without the bigger six-cell lion battery pack they usually offer, either. But I couldn't stand the atoms.

F-C has one of the dell mini 10s, and likes it, but I think it's -too- small, and it has what for me would a be a crippling design flaw - the buttons are integrated under the trackpad, not separated, so certain click and drag operations are physically impossible. They may have redesigned that by now; I dunno.

You might want to think about avoiding spinners altogether. I didn't, but a lot of people swear that's the way to go. A lot of places sell netbooks with only flash memory and no HD at all. One of the bigger performance problems in some netbooks are those teeny weak-sauce HDs. The space is more limited that way, and they're more expensive. But they're faster and more durable.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I'm actually an opponent of ubuntu netbook remix. For all but the very absolute tiniest and underpowered netbooks, I think it's completely unnecessary, and some of their unbundling decisions - and the redesigned UI, which I intensely dislike - are really questionable. Just go with ubuntu, regular flavor.

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

I've been pretty happy with the netbook remix on mine, but I've never used the standard Ubuntu, so possibly I don't know what I'm missing. But I actually really like the UI.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

I use UNR on my netbook (have it dual partitioned with XP) and am not crazy about it. It is buggy as all get out, as is usual with ubuntu. I took it off UNR view mode to classic view mode, and now I can't see my desktop. And no one will fix it!!

Here is the thing about ubuntu (of all sorts): It is easy to use, if you don't want to change anything or nothing goes wrong.Otherwise, it is hell to fix or change. I love ubuntu and hate it.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

oh, and I have a Dell mini10v. I got it because I could hackintosh it, which I haven't done yet and probably won't as that would mean making another partition. But who knows?

I like it, but the screen is small sometimes. I got it with XP and then threw UNR on another partition, and they run well for the most part. The trackpad has some weirdness and it has serious issues with windows not resizing correctly, but that may not be an issue for netbooks with larger monitors.

[roter-terror.livejournal.com]

If you like Ubuntu, you should consider trying Lubuntu 10.04 when it comes out in a few weeks. I used UNR on my netbook for a long time, but after spending some time away from my desktop and having to rely on the netbook for all my work, I found that UNR wasn't quite snappy enough when I had lots of things going on. With Lubuntu (also Crunchbang), I've found that my netbook now feels faster than my desktop.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Off topic, more cats.

And Happy Birthday!

[sabotabby]

Thank you!

[ginny-t.livejournal.com]

I have a Samsung N130. I went for the slightly higher-end model, mostly for the bigger and a little bit for the keyboard (the huge-ass hard drive was a bonus, I guess). It came with Windows 7 Starter, which is fine, but kinda weaksauce. At first I was a little miffed because I couldn't get Linux working with the wireless card (it uses 801.11n, and the Linux kernel hadn't caught up). I've since been able to get Jolicloud up and running, and I'm all 'round happy! (I left it as a dual boot mostly because HP is ass about keeping up the OS X drivers, and my printer had been useless for over a year.)

[audrawilliams.livejournal.com]

I have an MSI Wind that I looove.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

If I do manage to get myself out to TO for everything, I can let you play with mine.

[fluffworld.livejournal.com]

I'm not hugely technical, but I love my Eeepc (900 series). Cheap, fast, has never crashed.

...sometimes, when people aren't looking, I hug it.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Happily, the market has matured enough that there are a lot of good options.


If your budget permits, though, I'd actually consider an iPad. Seriously.

[roter-terror.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming Sabotabby might want to do something practical while she travels. An iPad might be enjoyable as an adjunct to a desktop or laptop, but good luck doing serious text entry or simple things like transferring pictures to it (without some marked-up Apple peripheral). Or using useful software.

[sabotabby]

Ugh. Budget aside, it doesn't have a keyboard. Even my cell phone has a keyboard. Not to mention that it looks fragile (or at least easily scratched), and you can't take it apart, just buy more apps for it.

And I say this as a Mac girl.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

It's a competitor in that space, is all I'm saying, and your stated needs, it might have matched.


Total sympathy, though - I spend enough time with my keyboard that doing things without the tactile feedback is a lot harder.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

I just went netbook shopping a few weeks ago. I settled on an ASUS Eee PC 1001P for the following reasons:

1) Most recent Atom CPU (N450? medium power, but doesn't eat up the battery like the AMD s_j mentioned)
2) Matte screen (I hate the gloss)
3) Decent keyboard (if it didn't have a glossy screen and a crappy keyboard, I would have gone for the ASUS 1005 instead)

I got a SKU with a 250G HDD, and I bought a 2G barrette of RAM to replace the 1G it came with, the maximum this machine can take. This particular model uses 800mhz RAM as opposed to 667mhz most other netbooks use.

I can't tell about how useful it is so far, as I haven't had time to install anything on it, but I intend to make it my photography computer. We'll see how it handles Photoshop CS4 with that kind of RAM and processor on 12 megapixels photos.

One thing I can't do with this model, which I kinda regret not looking up beforehand, is to turn it into a Hackintosh, as my graphic chipset isn't supported. In the same range, the Dell Mini 10v seems to be supported.

esizzle is right, you want a backup solution.

[roter-terror.livejournal.com]

Advice: if you don't absolutely need Firefox, you'll probably want to run Chrome/Chromium on any netbook you may get. The difference between start-up times is like night and day. Also, I hear Chrome/Chromium uses less power since it doesn't pester the CPU as much.

[suburbannoir.livejournal.com]

I had one of the original EeePC's with the 7inch screens which I loved, but it wasn't very powerful. My flatmate has a EeePC901 which seems OK, but I don't like the keyboard much.

A friend has a MSI Wind which he installed OSX on. I think you can do that with the Winds and the Dell netbooks.

Other than that, the Samsung ones I've seen look the best, but I've never used one.

[secretsoflife.livejournal.com]

i have a wind, and love it. i've also played around with the samsungs, lenovos, hps, and dells and they are all nice.

the only thing with the HPs to watch out for is that they don't allow you to swap out the wifi card due to a software whitelist of only certain cards in the BIOS. this makes me a sad hacker, so don't buy them :(

[sabotabby]

Oh, thanks for this. The IT guy at my mom's work is going on about the HPs, but that's a major design flaw.

How do you feel about the Acer? That and the Wind seem to be the most popular choices.

[secretsoflife.livejournal.com]

the acers are pretty reliable and diiiiirt cheap. make sure you try the keyboard in person first, they are pretty variable.

oh and check out what Staples has on clearance. they often have awesome deals as they refresh their hardware lines every 3 months or something ludicrous like that.

[ironed_orchid]

I have an EeePC 901, I don'y know how much I'd recommend it compared to some of the newer things on the market, but I do love it and it is brilliant for travel.

[tormenta.livejournal.com]

Arnon and I regret buying netbooksnibtea of proper laptops. We both have work laptops and of we could do it again would opt for refurb laptop for the price.

80% of the functionality of a netbook will be available in the tablet market - ipad etc; give it a year and get your choice of the full screen tablets at that time.

IMHO.

If you do get a netbook look for 2-touch pinch zoom style touhpad and the highest screen resolution you can get!