Any Experience with Netbooks?

[Gregoshi]

In less than two weeks I'll be taking an extended (7-8 week) vacation in Australia. My wife and daughter have laptops they will be taking but that leaves my son and I out in the cold as far as our internet fix goes. I've been kicking around the idea of getting a netbook for us to share during the trip. The primary use would be for internet surfing & email. What got me thinking of this was seeing an Acer netbook on sale for $230 (USD). I see they range up into the $400+ range which brings them into the price range of low end laptops. I can read reviews and such (and will) but does anyone here have one or has had experience with using one? If so, what did you think of it? Like it? Hate it? Somewhere inbetween?
does it perform fast or sluggish? How about surfing speed?

I was in Best Buy today and looked at a few models. Some were downright junky looking and their keyboard/pad felt junky. Then I saw a higher end Asus and that one looked and felt well made.

Anyway, I'm just looking for some real experiences to suppliment my reading.

[Xiahou]

I have a EEE PC (linux version) that I'm pretty happy with considering the cost of admission. When I bought mine, I went for a model with more disk space, but apparently the 16GB "Solid State Drive" was really just a soldered in SD card... which wasn't so great performance wise....

Nonetheless I'm still pretty happy with it- it does what it's supposed to. I can get on the Internet via Firefox, place videocalls via Skype and type papers via OpenOffice. It sometimes seems to bog down a little with multiple tabs open with Flash video, ect.- that may be due to the slow drive, but either way, I never expected blazing fast performance from it and it gets good battery life when unplugged. It would make a poor replacement for a proper desktop PC, but for a way to stay connected on the go, I'm satisfied.

[Chimpyang]

I have an Advent 4211 - which is a cheaper rebranded MSI Wind.

Specs are :

-the usual atom processor
-integrated graphics - struggles a little with iPlayer HD but ok for youtube and -watching lower rez stuff
-1 GB of ram - some have managed to up it to 2 gig though.
-80 GB HDD - not bad - not the greatest but it works
-Windows XP
-10in screen
-2hr battery with occasional wireless use - 2hr 30 if you save a bit

It's got a good keyboard - which is pretty nice to type on - only thing is that the Fn and the Ctrl are swapped - and it takes a little getting used to.

Pros:

Decently fast - dont load up XP with too much to do at startup and it'll boot quite quickly - you can always install Ubuntu if you want as well - both the netbook remix and the standard editions support most of the hardware as it is a popular model.

Wireless is better at holding signal than the MacBook pro what my flatmate has - you many need to update the drivers to the latest version manually though. The older one had a weird 20 min cutoff bug for the wireless

Good Keyboard - responsive - you probs want to have a go on one first though.

Standard touchpad design - I dont like the acer one's one with the buttons at the side - I am perhaps more clumsy than most though.

Cheap - I got mine at refurb for £199 - they are coming down more as MSI have released a new Wind recently and Advent have a similar copycat version - better batt life but essentially the same till better atom's come out

Cons:

Battery life isnt great

USB ports seem a little smaller than usual - my flatmate's USB stick just would not go in - maybe casing or whatever - but def. odd.

Charger is a bit bulky - not the nicest thing ever, but altogether the thing doesn't weigh much.

--------------
I love the thing, and it's been rated as one of the better models out there. Happy hunting though!

[Gregoshi]

Well, it sounds encouraging. A few annoyances, but that is par for the course with most things. Thank you for taking the time to respond gentlemen.

[Furunculus]

i have a lenovo ideapad S10e.

great build quality, second only to the HP 2140.
screen is an annoying 1024x576 which is problematic for running old games, as most need 600 vertical resolution.
but gaming on any netbook is marginal and the screen is fine for video and t'internet.

if you want more resolution then the HP 2140 and the Dell Mini 10 can be ordered with as 1366x768 10" screen.

the Dell mini 10 has a integrated chipset that is even worse than the typical GMA950 found on other netbooks, but does have the option of a GPS module which might be nice.

if battery life is what you are after then the samsung and recent 10" asus netbooks are very good.

if you can hold off then i would highly recommend waiting for the 11.6" 'netbooks' to arrive as they should use much better hardware platforms such as: nVidia Ion, AMD Athlon Neo + 780G, or Intel CULV.
these have the advantage of 1366x768 screens combined with hardware that actually can play most older games, even if at low specs.

[Chimpyang]

I forgot to add - screen rez is 1024 x 600 - with support for a fudged version of 1024x768.

I can run MTW VI perfectly fine in 800x600 and HoI2 works okayish in the fudged version of 1024x768. (In that resolution you have to scroll down for the missing bit of the screen..not too bad when you can control game speed a bit).

Sound is alright as well - but the speakers are understanbly shocking. Headphones make it okay.

[Gregoshi]

if you can hold off then i would highly recommend waiting for the 11.6" 'netbooks' to arrive as they should use much better hardware platforms such as: nVidia Ion, AMD Athlon Neo + 780G, or Intel CULV...

This is creeping very close to small laptop territory. Will these be better than the current crop of 14" lowend laptops? How do current highend netbooks compare to the lowend laptops? Or is a full blown laptop still better (general) capability-wise than the netbooks?

[Furunculus]

netbooks are hopelessely underpowered compared to laptops.

the GMA 950 has a 3Dmark 2006 score that averages around 140.

this compares rather badly to a modern intel budget laptop which gets ~850 with the montevino platform,

and terribly compared to a budget AMD PUMA platform laptop which gets ~1400

and catastropically compared to a macbook style notebook using the nvidia Ion platform which gets around 2100 3Dmarks.

an 11.6" net/note book is a compromise which is nearly as small as a netbook and as powerful as a basic notebook.

[Gregoshi]

So basically your $400+ netbook (current generation) vs a $500-$600 notebook is a matter of size/weight/battery life convenience (netbook) or performance (notebook) - relatively speaking - and is the price difference worth to you what you are getting or losing.

Hmmm, must ponder this...

[Xiahou]

Ask yourself what you're going to be doing with it. Neither the netbook nor the notebook will do any serious gaming. Both should be capable of basic office apps, web browsing, IM, video conferencing, ect.

To be sure, you're going to lose some functionality with a netbook- which is why I say they're a bad choice for someone's only PC. But for people like myself who have separate desktops, they're a nice way to stay connected when you're away from it.

My desktop is in my upstairs "office", whereas the netbook usually lives in my living room. I love having it to hop on line with while watching TV, or for chatting/looking up gamefaqs while playing console games, ect. It's also extremely convenient to grab if I know I'm going somewhere that has WiFi. Often, I don't even turn it off- just shut it (which puts it on standby), unlpug it and slip it into it's jacket- its power consumption is almost nil in that state.

If you just want something to get online and stay connected with, I'd go netbook. If you need a full-featured (albeit underpowered) PC, go with a budget notebook.

[Gregoshi]

Xiahou, sounds like you use it the way I was envisioning it. My wife has a notebook, my daughter has a Macbook, which leaves me and my son fighting over the desktop. This is much better than a couple of years ago when all four of us would compete for the desktop. You'd shift in the chair to scratch your butt and the other three would lunge at the seat because they thought you were getting up..."Sorry, false alarm <snicker snicker>." Anyway, often my son and I are just hopping on the internet or checking email, so a netbook would be perfect. And for our lengthy Australian oddyssey, it would be an ideal traveling companion.

Thank you all for the information and your experiences. <insert bow smilie>

[Lemur]

I wanted to get one of the Asus linux netbooks when our old WinXP laptop died. But Mrs Lemur insisted -- insisted! -- that we get a MacBook instead. Bitter? Me? Only a little.

I've got nothing against OS X, and Apple can still make a slick piece of hardware, but I really, really wanted to play around with the Asus. Grumble grumble grumble.

[Furunculus]

10" netbooks are great travelling companions, they are so small you just chuck them into your rucksack without a second thought.

having said that, when i buy again i want a minimum of 1366x768 with an integrated DX10 chipset, which can be done down to a slim 11.6" chassis IMO.

for me that would be the ideal compromise, as it would still have the horsepower for productivity tasks and light gaming as well as video and web use.

[Tellos Athenaios]

No experience; but still a piece of advice you may want to take into account:
Keyboards probably aren't the problem if your hands aren't too big, however screen real-estate *is*. You'll notice with websites that many of the more `large amounts of text' types do seem to be based around the idea of a _minimum_ of 1024*768. Unless you plug in an external (USB) mouse which has rather good low-friction scrolling (as opposed to the incremental model of nearly all mice) that may be a bit annoying with N-page documents (with N any amount larger than 2).

It's not just that your screen is particularly small. It is also that unless you get yourself an OS tuned to a netbook (if I were you and I were to get a netbook anytime soon, I'd most definitely try out Moblin for that: if only for the fact that its a heavily optimised Linux for the Intel netbooks: 5seconds for a cold boot to desktop is not bad at all) you will notice that all aplications love to take up some X amount of vertical and screen-real estate, with X likely being about 50px for anything that supports tabs, and in the vicinity of ~100-150px for things that use the 'ribbon' thing or uses many layers of toolbars (so that is many common office applications right there).

I find myself noticing that on a 1280x800 laptop screen: I have my desktop configured to trays, task bars etc... If you want to do anything like displaying 2 Word documents side by side, it's going to be mildly unpleasant I'd expect. It takes a fair amount of re-sizing already on what is a much more convenient resolution of 1280px in width.

[Xiahou]

Anyone ever play with putting an alternative Linux Distro on the eeePC? I'm kind of sick of the Xandros install that it comes with. The interface feels too constricting and everything is so far out of date that it's a real problem to do something as simple as update flashplayer.

First, I downloaded Mandriva (my current distro of choice). I had read that it had good compatibility with netbook hardware and it's a distro I feel familiar with. However, when it came to getting it to boot a live install from a USB flash drive, I ran into problems- of course there are fixes for it, but it started to feel like I was shoe-horning something onto it that really didn't belong there.

So now, I'm looking at Easy Peasy and Eeebuntu, both are Ubuntu variants. It's basically a coin toss, so I asked my wife which she thought looked nicer... I'll be trying Easy Peasy first.

If anyone has experience with these or any other distros on a netbook, let me know.

[Husar]

That Easy Peasy looks sexy, if I had a netbook I'd want to try it.

[Xiahou]

That Easy Peasy looks sexy, if I had a netbook I'd want to try it.

It looked great... but too much didn't work out of the gate. I wanted a distro that worked from the getgo with minimal frustration. Eeeubuntu fit the bill.

For both I did the live test running it off a USB drive. For Easy Peasy, things like LCD brightness controls, the mute button- and most importantly wifi did not work when testing the live version... pretty disappointing for a distro that supposed to be designed for netbooks. With Eeeubuntu, everything I tried worked- so the choice was clear.

I've already got it installed and running- it installs right from the live version as its running and I'm able to do everything I could under the old install. Now it just runs much snappier and its a proper, full featured OS.

[Whacker]

I wanted to get one of the Asus linux netbooks when our old WinXP laptop died. But Mrs Lemur insisted -- insisted! -- that we get a MacBook instead. Bitter? Me? Only a little.

I've got nothing against OS X, and Apple can still make a slick piece of hardware, but I really, really wanted to play around with the Asus. Grumble grumble grumble.

Shenanigans, brother Lemur. Shenanigans. I love my wife dearly, but there are certain things where I firmly, unswervingly put my foot down and will not suffer to be in this household, Apple-based computing devices other than ipods being one of them.



Dell recently had a big commercial on TV for it's own little mini-laptops. I don't know how much they were going for, but they looked kinda slick on the outside.

[Lemur]

I love my wife dearly, but there are certain things where I firmly, unswervingly put my foot down and will not suffer to be in this household, Apple-based computing devices other than ipods being one of them.

Why the iPod exception?

The main user of the laptop is Mrs. Lemur, so it didn't seem fair for me to overrule her. Also, I do not have quasi-religious objections too all things Apple. I am a computational slut, spreading my love between all OSes.

[Whacker]

Why the iPod exception?

The main user of the laptop is Mrs. Lemur, so it didn't seem fair for me to overrule her. Also, I do not have quasi-religious objections too all things Apple. I am a computational slut, spreading my love between all OSes.

My dearest Lemur, please do not call my hypocrisy into public display.

In all seriousness, the only reason I got the iPod was because it was the only 60gb portable mp3 player available at the time. I really wanted the iRiver, but the biggest they had was 30 gig, and my music collection clocks quite a bit higher.

As to Apple, my reasons for despising them are known, I will not spew them yet again in here. Suffice to say that, as the poor bastard who runs tech support for my own family, my parents and in-laws, I have a very distinct say in who computes with what in all households. I've only had to fight this battle once when my brother in law and his wife were suggesting to my mother in law that she get a Crapple, to which I promptly responded that was fine but I would provide zero tech support for it. Thankfully she wasn't really interested to begin with.

Now that I think about it, a Netbook would probably have been a very good choice for both of them, they are not "power users" by any stretch of the imagination.

Finally, please stop being such a promiscuous user. I had to get a new keyboard and mouse since you touched mine after using that horrible unmentionable ... thing of yours. There are some stains that bleach and fire cannot erase. You need to find a good, wholesome OS that you can settle down with and will treat you right.

Like BSD.

/runs like hell

[Furunculus]

this is about the most appealing 'netbook' i have yet seen:
http://www.liliputing.com/2009/07/sa...is-summer.html

i don't like 1024x600, as 1366x768 is much more useful.
but i'm not convinced that 1366 on a 10" screen would not induce eye-strain, so 11.6" is better
it also uses the nVidia Ion chipset
the battery life will be great

all it really needs is a better CPU.