I just purchased a netbook

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Specifically, and Acer Aspire One A150, with 1gb of ram, and 120gb hdd…

I must say I’m quite pleased with it. I wanted something to replace my old palm pilot that I used to read ebooks, and this little thing does that perfectly, along with the added bonus of web surfing and movies off of my wireless network. The screen is, imo, the biggest surprise, as it is exceptionally bright and vibrant, with a very wide viewing angle. It only weighs 2 lbs, so its quite easy to just pick up and carry off to bed, or the bathroom, or chat while sitting on the sofa watching TV.
Not bad at all for $350
Currently, as an experiment, I am installing Half-Life 2 in order to gauge how useful it is for gaming.

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I’ll be interested to see how you like it long term. These sound like exactly what I’m looking for. Anybody think there’s a chance that Apple will come out with one?

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Nope. The Steve has said as much. They just don’t see enough of a market to invest millions of R&D dollars in a netbook. Perhaps at some point, if the netbook thing catches on, but the Macbook Air is about as close as you’re going to come right now.

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Thanks, Mindfield. Not the answer I wanted, but pretty definitive.

Here’s another question from someone deeply non-technical. Can a netbook that runs on Windows or Linux interface happily with a Mac?

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The Half Life 2 experiment failed. It played, but at a very poor 5-10fps with stuttering sound issues. Ah well. :smiley:
@Punkyova: I’ve never worked with a mac, but I would bet the interface wouldn’t be quite so happy as 2 macs. Still, it shouldn’t be too terribly hard to get the two talking to each other so you can share files.

Using some google fu there seems to be a lot of people doing this, and there were more than a few how-tos.

As for the netbook itself, after some more testing…

Surfing the internets - No issues here. Youtube. The Dope. IRC. All worked perfectly. It does have a rather high resolution in a cramped space, so some text enlargement may be in order, depending on your eyesight. Fortunately Firefox 3 handles zooming like a champ.

Typing - Keyboard is a bit cramped… I definitely will not be writing any essays on this thing. However, portions of this were written from the comfort of my bathroom, which is way cool.

Music/movies - No issues at all. I was able to play a dvd movie from my PCs drive while across the street. Tested a variety of different formats and codecs, and VLC played em all. The screen is, as I said earlier, surprisingly nice.

Gaming - Not great, but I wasn’t expecting it. It can(according to videos I’ve seen on youtube) play WoW decently(playable framerate, but not fantastic). Handles flash games fine though, and it played Homeworld quite well.

Peripherals - 3 USB 2.0 slots, 2 SD card slots, and a plug for a monitor(the old kind, not the new digital connection), plus headphone and microphone jack.

Battery - 1.5-2.5 hours, depending on usage, from what I’ve read. To new to say for certain though.

The biggest con I’ve found so far is that this particular model doesn’t have bluetooth. I could have sworn it did. No biggy though, since I don’t have and wasn’t really planning to get any bluetooth gadgets.

Bottom line, it does everything I need it to do, and then some. However, if a dvd/cd player is a requirement, or you expect to be typing a lot. I would avoid a netbook.

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Congrats, I hope you enjoy it. I got one of the first generation Eee PC’s when they first came out, which I replaced this summer with their 9" screen version. They work wonderfully at what they’re designed for, and many people have managed to get games like Half Life 2 to work too (sorry it didn’t work out for you; guess it’s not entirely straightforward). How is the placement of the mouse buttons working out for you?

I am, however, a little worried that the 9" screen might be burning out my eyes. I’ve started keeping the brightness at a higher level, but I’m thinking I might just need to get a bigger one. While the 9 and 10" models are extremely portable, Dell is going to make a 12" one that is similarly inexpensive that would still be convenient to carry. It’d be nice if more manufacturers did that, since it sucks that the only laptops in the 11-12" category are still around $1500.

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Whoa! TMI!

Other than that, thanks for the review.

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I’ve got a 9" Dell Mini on the way, and I’m really looking forward to it. As for the Mac interface issue, I just went with the XP version, but a friend of my boyfriend is planning on getting an Eee PC and loading OSX. I don’t think he’s done it yet, but if I hear anything one way or the other about his experience, I’ll report back.

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Its… Iffy. I was not, however, really expecting miracles in that department. The touchpad and mouse are fine for emergencies or intermittent use, but I got a small optical mouse as well, since my experience with laptops has taught me that there simply is no replacement for a mouse. This unit is no exception, but its functional.

One interesting thing I found just a bit ago while searching for mouse options… http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=6465

Useless to me, since netbooks lack a pcmcia slot, and mine in particular has no bluetooth, but that looks like the single best mouse solution for a laptop i’ve ever seen. Just thought I would share.

I’m quite happy with the size, and, if anything, would likely prefer something slightly smaller. My main consideration for purchasing this was as a book reader, and in that respect this 8.9" screen is a considerable upgrade in size, since I’ve read for thousands of hours on a small PDA screen. Since I didn’t really carry around my PDA anymore, I decided the extra functionality and compatibility of having an XP machine would be better than another ultra small gizmo. PCs smaller than this though get vastly more expensive in short order, so I’m fine with the 8.9" screen.

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This hasn’t been dead long enough to count as a zombie, has it?

I’m posting this on a Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu. Kind of hard to type on the tiny keyboard, and the minimal internal storage is disconcerting (but I’ve nearly a terabyte in USB storage sitting around).

For $300 it’s a fun little deal, and my kids are being exposed to Linux at an early age (I got several of these things so each son has one of their own). The 12 year old figured it out in about 5 minutes, 9 year old just does games and youtube anyway, so doesn’t care about the OS.

I suspect this thing is smaller, costs less, and is more versatile than the Amazon or Sony ebook reader.