Jayce
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Somebody gave me a netbook yesterday under the impression of "it doesn't work, I don't want it anymore, I got an iPad and it's more than I need so I'll just be keeping that. If you fix this thing, keep it."
Okay, fine. So I took it home. It's a basic little unit, standard netbook spec. 1gb ram 160gb hdd 1.6ghz atom 8.9" screen by Acer Aspire One. I thought it'd be convenient to have since my iBook JUST died a matter of 3-4 weeks ago, and I loved that little limited use laptop in the garage for streaming music and other stuff. I fired up this Acer only to find it was just a corrupt XP install. Easily fixable, but I decided to just nuke the partition (after all it wasn't my partition anyway) and reinstall with my OS of choice.
I never had a netbook, but I worked with a lot of 10" netbooks heavily here at work because we have a bunch of them for elementary students, which in my opinion, are perfect for them. So anyway I get it going and installed all of my applications on it, etc.
I have to admit, this is a neat little thing. After having used an iPad for about an hour or two yesterday and it fresh in my mind, it was interesting to compare a netbook to an iPad in a relatively similar time span. While I loved using the iPad, I no doubt ran into shortcomings. Likewise, I also ran into shortcomings with this netbook. But that's the whole point. My iBook could barely run youtube videos and were always sluggish and choppy (no, I'm not talking full screen either - the videos embedded in the page that are non-full screened). So I felt as though this netbook would be a perfect (and hugely updated) replacement.
Likewise, having a 160gb hard drive over my iBook's 30gb hard drive is significantly more awesome. Plus I was surprised at just how snappy Ubuntu desktop edition was on this netbook, with taking up quite a bit less than 200mb of RAM to run. It'll prove to be a nice little workhorse laptop. The perfect replacement for an aging iBook, if you ask me.
I find it kind of interesting that people say the netbook market is dying. I think the opposite is happening, and that it's just getting fired up. I think we'll just see a nice mutation of netbooks/laptops that flip out to different form factors, like that Dell that was on CNET a while ago that could flip into a very slim slate (iPad comparable) or flip open with a full keyboard and the all too familiar standard laptop layout. One unit to handle both tasks? Sounds like a winner to me.
It'll be interesting to see where this technology takes us. But for the time being, I have a neat little freebie toy that'll accompany me through a decent array of tasks I found myself lost with after the recent demise of my very old iBook.
Okay, fine. So I took it home. It's a basic little unit, standard netbook spec. 1gb ram 160gb hdd 1.6ghz atom 8.9" screen by Acer Aspire One. I thought it'd be convenient to have since my iBook JUST died a matter of 3-4 weeks ago, and I loved that little limited use laptop in the garage for streaming music and other stuff. I fired up this Acer only to find it was just a corrupt XP install. Easily fixable, but I decided to just nuke the partition (after all it wasn't my partition anyway) and reinstall with my OS of choice.
I never had a netbook, but I worked with a lot of 10" netbooks heavily here at work because we have a bunch of them for elementary students, which in my opinion, are perfect for them. So anyway I get it going and installed all of my applications on it, etc.
I have to admit, this is a neat little thing. After having used an iPad for about an hour or two yesterday and it fresh in my mind, it was interesting to compare a netbook to an iPad in a relatively similar time span. While I loved using the iPad, I no doubt ran into shortcomings. Likewise, I also ran into shortcomings with this netbook. But that's the whole point. My iBook could barely run youtube videos and were always sluggish and choppy (no, I'm not talking full screen either - the videos embedded in the page that are non-full screened). So I felt as though this netbook would be a perfect (and hugely updated) replacement.
Likewise, having a 160gb hard drive over my iBook's 30gb hard drive is significantly more awesome. Plus I was surprised at just how snappy Ubuntu desktop edition was on this netbook, with taking up quite a bit less than 200mb of RAM to run. It'll prove to be a nice little workhorse laptop. The perfect replacement for an aging iBook, if you ask me.
I find it kind of interesting that people say the netbook market is dying. I think the opposite is happening, and that it's just getting fired up. I think we'll just see a nice mutation of netbooks/laptops that flip out to different form factors, like that Dell that was on CNET a while ago that could flip into a very slim slate (iPad comparable) or flip open with a full keyboard and the all too familiar standard laptop layout. One unit to handle both tasks? Sounds like a winner to me.
It'll be interesting to see where this technology takes us. But for the time being, I have a neat little freebie toy that'll accompany me through a decent array of tasks I found myself lost with after the recent demise of my very old iBook.
