Netbooks vs. Laptops

[Rosuav]

Laptop == Notebook. Half way between a Notebook and a Mobile Phone is a "Netbook". It's wonderfully confusing. Try holding a long conversation about them without accidentally getting the wrong vowel sound and getting people off on the wrong track...

Bael, is that 80GB a standard 2.5" ff notebook drive, or is it the 1.9" (? 1.6"?) smaller variety? I can't see it on the site. In any case... What you're sold is 80 billion bytes of hard disk space, but you might well see less than 70GB in Windows - partly because of the difference between decimal and binary "gig", but also because of the recovery partition. It's a nasty trap - you lose 2-4GB of space just to that. Ugh.

[Aristotle]

Once again, I definitely recommend finding a way to test whatever netbook you buy. They make it really hard to even find pictures of their whole keyboard a lot of the time, and that can be a disaster.

[Bael]

Actually, cnet.com is actually pretty badass about their netbook reviews and making sure you get to see the keyboard. Apparently there are some big players in the market now (Lenovo, HP, Dell). HP has the 'biggest' keyboard of the bunch, Dell's is a weird second... but if that's an issue you can always find one with bluetooth or just use a USB keyboard when you have it "docked" at home on your desk.

It also seems that it's a growing trend for companies to produce XP versions of netbooks... which actually only seem to run $20-30 more than the "linux" versions. What I'm actually curious in is getting one and dual-booting between XP and a full version of say Red Hat or Slackware. Which may be tough to do with a 16 GB Solid State HDD, but I guess the idea is to find one that either carries a 32GB one if solid state is that important, or an actual disk.

As for your question Rosuav, it's an actual laptop HDD, 2.6" or whatever. So in theory you could upgrade it to a 7200rpm drive. But I haven't looked up crazy upgrade/netbook hacking paths yet.

[Aristotle]

We are seriously considering this one:

Acer Aspire One - 10.1" WSVGA 1GB Memory 160GB HDD Netbook

It is one of the only netbooks with a full size, right side shift key. That's important for the way Dalaena types. It also seems to have solid specs and a nice 10.1" screen - all for $349 at Newegg.

[Pae]

Not sure if it's an issue for Dal or not, but my buddy has it with Windows XP and loves it. He has the unfortunate habit of dropping his laptops (poor guy lost his macbook in a few weeks b/c of that). Anyways, he's dropped this one from table height twice and it's still going strong.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Pae
Not sure if it's an issue for Dal or not, but my buddy has it with Windows XP and loves it. He has the unfortunate habit of dropping his laptops (poor guy lost his macbook in a few weeks b/c of that). Anyways, he's dropped this one from table height twice and it's still going strong.

The smaller the device, the more likely it'll survive a fall. Also, smaller devices are easier to make rugged - a steel frame doesn't feel so heavy when you're looking at a little netbook rather than, say, a 17" Compaq laptop (I've had to repair a particular model of Compaq that was so badly built that the entire base could flex enough to break connections on the mobo - they obviously tried to cut down weight by having less structural strength, and the results were less than satisfactory, imho).

However, just because these things have been dropped and not destroyed before, don't treat them carelessly. Survival of a fall of that nature depends on a huge number of factors, including what part hits the ground first, what sort of surface it lands on, the precise angle at which it lands, etc, etc, etc. I always apologize to my electronica if they get knocked... so in the interests of saving my breath, I tend to take care