Tempted to buy a Netbook
September 8th, 2008With companies seemingly releasing a new netbook every week I must admit that I’m tempted to buy one. There’s few things that are very appealing:
- Price, they’re very cheap so can be used as a second computer.
- Very light and portable. My 15″ laptop is miles more powerful but you can’t just throw it in a bag and not notice, the new netbooks all weight around 1kg.
- Great to play around with using Linux. The default systems run by may of these is somewhat limited but there’s a whole slew of sites started up showing you how to install your favourite Linux distro on these machines. Hours of fun for people like me!
- Later machines have better keyboards and improved battery life so are comfortable to use on long trips and will last all day.
I’m looking at the Acer Aspire One right now but I’d rather wait until it’s available with the 6 cell battery as the 3 cells only gives 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life. It runs a Linux disro called Linpus Linux Lite which is a modified version of Fedora 8 but running XFCE as the desktop manager.
I tried one out in a shop over the weekend, it was the 512MB version with the 8GB SSD disk and running Linux. I thought it felt pretty snappy in use with very little lag when opening applications, of course opening a 100+ page pdf file took about 30 seconds but for everyday use it seemed good.
The Thunar file manager was very easy to use and files appeared instantly when browsing the drive. Even though by default it’s pretty locked down there’s plenty of sites explaining how to unlock the interface. Failing that I might just install a new distro, the only problem being that it will have to be from a usb drive since I don’t have an external DVD drive (and don’t intend to buy one).
Edit: there’s a really good review of the Aspire One here.
