Hi Guys,
I have spent the last week reading up on loads of different netbooks and have come to a grinding halt, there are just so many :shock: :shock: :shock:
I'm looking for Windows XP/Vista and a webcam with good battery life with a price tag of around £300.
Can anyone recommend a good one from experience :?: :?: :?: :?:
Cheers
Simon
Ralph Waldo Emerson: We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
My wife was a bit dubious about netbooks. I got her a Samsung NC 10. My, has she thanked me for it. The Samsung seems a pretty good netbook.
Best wishes,
Bob
PS I, on the other hand, prefer the smaller size of my Asus eee pc 701, which has a keyboard just barely big enough for me to touch type on.
RLF
I use an NC10 and very happy with it. Good size keyboard
hi simon i use a eee pc 901, really good battery life and am impressed with its power for its size, i have the solid sstate one as hard drives dont work for me it has a 16gb memory whhich i combine with sd card storage.
i can recommend this asus.
cheers
mike :wink:
I have a 901 as well, running on Linux. Very happy with it, although I realise it's no longer considered to be the market leader. Does everything I need it to do, long battery life, portable - good compromise between size and ergonomics, connects wirelessly easily and quickly etc.
I want a roll up monitor, roll up keyboard, and small box into which they are plugge. Get it all under 1kg, and I will be happy.
Best wishes,
Bob
I dont think they do netbooks with Vista. If they do then dont buy one xp is the way forward, the aim of a net book is to run simple tasks one at a time so it almost doesnt matter what the spec is they will do the job, look at the hard drive size.
I just bought one ofr a client (cant remember which make) but cheapest place was Staples office supply, and i looked everywhere.
When I was looking around for a new netbook, the Samsung NC10 and NC20 (12" screen) were the fron-runners because of the superior keyboard.
Wound up with a heavily discounted Lenovo x61s Thinkpad instead, but I am not really sure whether that was a wise decision power-wise (the Lenovo is a high-speed, short-range fighter as opposed to the long-range MPA that the Samsung can be compared to) ... those Samsungs are awesome.
Watch weight and size ... I find 12" just about still tucks into other bags, anything bigger requires a separate piece of luggage. Max. weight of 1.5 kilos is just mangeable, too. So for me, those were the outer limits - but enough to get a decent keyboard-size.
Cheers,
Martin ("Crusader")
I've got an Advent 4211-C...10" netbook with XP. Have been very pleased so far...the only snag is the apalling battery life...you are lucky to see an hour out of it! This is the main drawback with all netbooks unless you invest in a battery with more cells.
I went for the 4211C because of the price I got it for. Netbook-wise, if I had £300, I'd have gone for the Samsung. The NC20 is about £399 but looks very 8) .
My only advice is that I'd avoid linux like the plague. There will be a lot of people who will disagree, but unless you are a computer programmer, you'll be buying into a pretty much commercially unsupported OS that is a bugger to do anything with. If don't you want to enter a world of hurt with distro's, terminal commands and boot loops, then avoid linux!!! It's this reason I'm sure that most netbooks manufacturers are killing off linux as the OS and going with XP.
One other point...after owning a couple of netbooks I've discovered that they are definitely no substitute for a proper desktop or laptop. I use my netbook on the move but if ever I get the chance of being in one place, I'm straight back on my 3 year old laptop.
Err...Originally Posted by Christian
My very old eeePC 701 runs for quite a lot longer than that and I haven't entered a terminal command, done anything with a distro (isn't that a left-handed linux :wink: ) or had a boot loop once... I did have some fruit loops but they were unrelated.
I use mine extensively for web browsing, email and simple office apps when on the move. It all just...works. And was plug and play with my '3' 3g dongle so well chuffed. Oh, and dirt cheap. And mine gets slung in my bag with careless abandon and still works great :D
Thanks for all the comments so far guys:
eeePC OR Samsung nc10 then it looks like :D
Will AOL work under linux ??
Cheers
Simon
Ralph Waldo Emerson: We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
If you want to pay, you can get all the support you want. Redhat just got put on the Standard and Poor 500, with a market capitalization of about 4 billion. They provide a linux distribution and as much support as you like.
By the bye, I wouldn't even think of running windows on any computer of mine, and never have. And, I'm not a programmer.
Best wishes,
Bob
PS I've never called Microsoft for customer support, so I don't know how good they are. But, the very best customer support I've ever had with a bit of computer hardware/software was with IBM. It was absolutely astonishing. I was trying to get one of their very early thin clients to boot linux remotely off a linux server, and ran into some problems. I emailed them saying that I got it off eBay, was experimenting, and didn't expect much help, but if there was anything quick they could tell me, .... I eventually got bumped up to the guy who wrote the bios for the thin client. With his help, it got sorted.
RLF
As in AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) or AOL as your ISP?
The eeePC I have comes with everything preinstalled including a multi client messenger called (I think) Pidgin - it connects to AIM, microsoft, yahoo etc - all the major chat programs.
If AOL is your ISP, I'm afraid I don't know if they do any oddities - they shouldnt tho. The wifi on the eee is good tho - I've used it all over the place (airports, hotels etc) and it works great.
This is just my 2 pence worth though; I'm sure the market has moved on a bit since then. Mine was under 200 quid but I bet you can get them second hand now for nothing...
I have an Acer with Linux which is excellent for browsing the web, however I wanted to buy a wireless 3 dongle for use away from home but it didn't work with Linux. Anyone got round this?
I'm now considering the Samsung NC10 with XP.
Here's a kludge. http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=254 If you update your software, it may include a fix.
Best wishes,
Bob
I still stand by what I said about linux. I like to expand beyond what is supplied on the pc. For example, I wanted an application to store all my passwords securely...on linux, I tried everywhere, found something totally overly complicated and then when I tried to install it (which is a buggers muddle to do) found that the programme wasn't suitable for the distro of linux I had. Installing was a nightmare...synaptics package manager failed, I had to do some 'sudo' command from the terminal.
I packed it in when I ended up getting in a 'boot loop'. ie the thing was knackered and wouldn't boot up without a factory reset. All because I tried to enable a standard desktop mode instead of the child like interface that came pre-installed.
Give me XP and MS Office anyday! :D
I also have an NC10 and would recommend it.
You can have them!
Best wishes,
Bob
Ditto - for free even!You can have them!
Best wishes,
Bob
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
Thank you Bob, I'll have to have a try.Here's a kludge. http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=254 If you update your software, it may include a fix.
Best wishes,
Bob
Regards
Julian
Just stay away from the tiny acer netbook's the fan noise is deafening , plus embarrassing when in public
How many have you had where the fan noise was embarassingly loud?
At least three distributions of Linux are commercially supported. Red Hat, as Bob points out, has RH Linux, but in addition support a free version called Fedora. Canonical, a company founded by multi-millionaire Mark Shuttleworth (the 2nd self-funded astronaut) supports a version of Linux called Ubuntu - which is great for beginners, or people that don't even want to know what a root account is.
I think you'll find the reason netbook manufacturers are killing off Linux as the OS has a lot to do with the business practices of a company based in Redmond, WA.
Interesting article : http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ernet.software
One also notices that netbooks are becoming thinner on the ground. The MS strategy, since nothing they have will work properly on a netbook, is to get manufacturers to drop the really inexpensive netbooks for mini-laptops. Linux will easily run (graphically) well on a 1GHz and slower computer with 512MB of memory and a couple of GB of storage. XP will do okay. Vista/Windows 7 won't. And, MS's margins are way too small for XP. So the plan is to get the netbook market to be a mini-laptop market.
Best wishes,
Bob
Go for an Samsung NC20, the newer bigger brother of the NC10. The main reason is the screen and the fact that it can run 1280 x 800 resolution.
http://www.dabs.com/products/samsung...Samsung%20NC20 should give the details.
I use an Acer Aspire One A150, it's the normal sort of netbook spec but has a 120gb hard drive. Battery life is about two and a half hours (assuming wifi is on and you're browsing constantly) but this can be expanded with a six-cell battery.
I spent a while researching different models and like the Samsung NC10 the AA1 came highly recommended because of it's good keyboard. As "a writing project" was the main reason for buying a netbook in the first place this was rather important and I can comfortably touch type on it at the same speed as my desktop's keyboard, though admittedly my fingers do hit a key wrong every few words. Given that I have shaky hands in the first place that's to be expected and it happens with my main PC too. Performance is great, it boots quickly, the screen is lovely (clear and bright, I use it outside a lot) and is on my network instantly. I'm not sure the fan is "embarassingly loud", infact any noise whatsoever is louder than it - apart from perhaps a ticking watch. It's such a nifty little thing, barely any bigger than the A5 notebooks I am writing on alongside it.
It did come with Linux but after a week or so I gave up trying to get on with it as frankly it felt like a step back entirely, especially given the surprising power of these little things.
Lastly then, the best bit. A Samsung NC10 was my second choice but was £300 (when I was looking a few weeks ago); I paid £150 for the AA1 brand new and well, simply couldn't be happier. I'm actually housebound so battery life is almost a non-issue for me but even if I paid for a six cell battery on top of the initial outlay I'd still have plenty of change leftover - not to mention 8 hours of total battery life.
Ultimately I imagine whatever you go for you'll be happy as long as you can get used to the fact that they do have smaller keyboards so enjoy your future purchase!
The Samsung has had some great reviews, especially in regards to keyboard and battery life.
However I didn't do any research when my eeepc gave up the ghost. I instead had a look in my local Tesco's and found a great wee Compaq Mini. Good quality keyboard and a clear 10" screen.
I have since replaced the XP OS with Ubuntu UNR 9.04. My wife tells me to stop tinkering with it...
Some problems getting the sound to work but sorted by looking up fixes on the net.
Dave
+1
I use an Acer Aspire One Series for web use - I'm quite picky about keyboard quality and I've got a few laptops depending on where I use them. I got the Acer for using in confined spaces such as commuting on the train and it really works well. I only use it for surfing the net but the keyboard is good quality so ideal for Word. I think I paid around £250. Re: the earlier post it does have a permanent fan but it's pretty quiet and you don't notice it after a minute. Highly recommended.
+1
Bought one for the 'wife' whom has never been interested, until the NC10 arrived !
It is a very functional, decent machine that does everything 'that is says on the tin' :wink:
Peter
NC10 here bought for entertainment when traveling with work. Its great cheap and light enough to not worry about in hand luggage. Use it insted of the desktop at home as well as its so convenient.
I'm sure they have improved it with the NC20 but have not tried yet.
Well I finally got one. I think I've read every review out there and even bought a ASUS EEEPC but the guy broke the screen while packaging it up so I went for a......
SAMSUNG N110
Its basically an updated NC10 but with improved mouse and nine hour battery life. Only been using it for a couple of hours and getting it set up but its fast, crystal clear and the keyboard is the mutts nuts. Just ordered the 2GB update :shock:
Thanks for all the help guys :D
Cheers
Simon
Ralph Waldo Emerson: We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
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