Netbooks. Love em? Or hate em

pullmyfoot · April 29th, 2009, 04:14 AM

Well these things, if you have not been living under a rock, have been taking the computing world by storm recently. I know there are lots of polls on tech websites like this, but I thought it would be interesting to see what the opinions are like here

I got a nice Acer netbook a month ago, based on the older Atom/945G chipset. I use it once in awhile, to school sometimes, and it works ok for me mainly because of the weight. However I didnt really use it much til this week. Anyways, I brought it on a short 3 day trip with the intention of getting some of my schoolwork done. Its smack in the middle of term for me you see, and the reason for the trip was the passing of my maternial grandmother

.

With that done, I completely hate the darn things now. My efficiency as of compared to using my regular desktop was about 10%. I got about an introduction for an essay done before I gave up and half a page of notes before I gave up on that too. In the end, the only thing it was good for was the built-in games (hearts and pinball

) and internet surfing at the hotel and airport.

I hate the tiny screen, for one, but that didnt bother me as much as the minuture keyboard and touchpad which caused me to mistype or accidently press wrong buttons exactly 26.416471245875% of the time. The touchpad included the side scrolling option, whatever its called (if you drag your finger on the right and bottom it scrols your document), and because of its small size kept causing me to brush it and lose the position I was at in my word document. Furthermore, it didnt help that the pageup and down bottuns were BELOW the arrow keys. Ugh.

Opinions? Anyone with a less horrible netbook/netbook keyboard arrangement?

I really dont care for the hardware, I'm completely happy with the Atom (though a little more would be nice, I'm looking at the Samsung/AMD mini laptop for that). What would be completely perfect would be if they made the darn thing 1" bigger. Perfect. Right now its like 9". Man. I'm seriously considering of selling this soon and getting the 13" (I think 13") Samsung/AMD lowpower CPU (forgot what its called, but from what I see its 50% faster than the Atom

) or maybe a nice 13" Macbook

I'm done with my ramble

If anyone bothered to read through it I applaud you (and call you a big fat geek).

him61 · April 29th, 2009, 05:40 AM

I bought an eeePC a little while ago as a cheap laptop that I could take to classes. It serves its purpose, but not much else, even though I try to have it do other things from time to time, with mixed outcomes.

pullmyfoot · April 29th, 2009, 07:12 AM

Mixed outcomes is right

Bizkitkid2001 · April 29th, 2009, 07:17 AM

If I were in the market right now, I would be waiting for this.

NVIDIA Ion Demo: 1080p Coming Soon to Netbooks (CES 2009) | Notebooks.com

**GroundZero3** · April 29th, 2009, 07:33 AM

I bought the dell mini 9 back in Feb, I sold it two weeks ago. I hardly used it and the performance wasnt up to my standards

vass0922 · April 29th, 2009, 09:13 AM

no need for one, so I'm not following the hype

could use a new real laptop though!

unfortunately its a want and not a need grrrr

<drop kicks current laptop>

hugorudd · April 29th, 2009, 10:22 AM

I like my Asus Eee PC 901. It's sturdy, has enough power for all my presentation work. lets me take notes and surf the net. I'm happy with it, though I could appeciate a little more power. i bought this on the way to buy a Macbook, and I realised the macbook was more power than I needed. Besides, i use the Behemoth at home, so there is no need for much more power.

KarmaKiller · April 29th, 2009, 10:58 AM

Man I love mine. I take mine with me all over. Lately I've been doing a lot of on site repair work for various people, and it's good to keep around if I need to download a driver real quick, or test their net connection to see if it's their PC or the net line itself.
We watch Hulu shows on it while we're laying in bed. I take it out on the back deck when it's nice and will stream music with it while reading/BBQ'ing, etc.
Really I've found 100 uses for ours.

pullmyfoot · April 29th, 2009, 12:19 PM

Well. yeah I do use it for that once in awhile Karma

conveneint stuff, though most of the time it just follows me along for nothing.

DoubleK · April 29th, 2009, 01:41 PM

You probably needed a laptop opposed to a computing device. These things are great!

Look at it this way, for the prosumer who already has a multitude of removable drives this thing is little more than the price of a good digital picture frame.

However I would not want to spend considerable time computing on a device straining the eyes so hard and I do not think it was intended for that. Like the iPod and iPhone this thing was designed for functionality and size!

I would rather spend $429 for an on sale brand new dell core2duo laptop. I am 240 pounds and 6'1 and can easily bench press it and its girly man 17" screen

I would not use either without a removable Logitech Nano mouse. My fingies are to big

One thing I though silly with the newer ones is it 16gb flash drive opposed to a huge conventional hard drive.

Doesn't XP and all of its updates consume almost HALF of that SSD flashdrive?