Mini Laptops - Comments Page 1

> but there may be a bit of a learning curve since it's not what you're used to using.

Why is that? About half the people I know are using Ubuntu at home. I think that you overestimate Windows usage.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Linux is definitely growing, but market share studies still have it at only 5-7% of the total.

I have a mini laptop,made by acer,the acer one,came with XP home and has a large 1GB hard drive,and 1GB memory. No cd player or burner,but no problem with a USB drive,I love it,works solid.

I had the opportunity to use an Acer Aspire mini laptop and it was awsome. 120gb hard drive, 2gb ram, atom processor and best of all it had Windows XP operating system. The unit worked flawlessly and fast. I've seen this unit at Costco for $349 which is an excellant price. Costco had about 300 units and they sold out in only two days! Lightweight 8.9" laptop that comes with a carrying case. I highly recomend it even though you need to get an external DVD/CD RW drive but I got one for $74 at Best Buy.

I just acquired a mini-laptop: the Asus eee PC 1000H, and am totally delighted. My hard drive is 160GB. And I can too play DVD/CD's...that's what the three USB ports are for! My netbook came installed with XP, but I intend to run Linux on it too...loaded via a USB stick.

The Linux interface that comes with these netbooks is quite elegant and easy to use...much more user friendly than what Windoze offers...especially for those who simply want to access the Internet for various reasons. You CAN watch video online, these mini-laptops handle streaming quite well, including audio.

I go all over the city with my netbook, and listen to online radio while working on something else, such as

writing my next blog, shopping, studying, and so on. I also videoconference, and interviews w/my handy little subnotebook...as it has an integrated 1.3mp webcam w/mic.

At home, I just plug the netbook to my larger LCD screen, to watch movies from the connected DVD drive. I also backup all my data to an 8GB SDHC card that I got off eBay for just $18! And since my personal work occupies less than 2 gigs, the card will last me a long time. So you don't even need a CD/DVD drive for data backup anymore! You can also back data to a USB stick, but I like the card 'cause it's flush with the laptop's edge.

So for me, my Asus netbook is a real work horse. And I don't see why it couldn't be a useful sidekick for most anyone else on the go.

I bought the Acer Aspire one with Linux (8gb ssd) I thought it would be possible to run XP on this machine. The power is sufficient but the ssd slows the machine to crawl. If you want to run XP get the hdd model. Why install XP? If you want to run a 3g modem you need XP. It may be possible with Linux but how?

i didn't like your criticism of linux it was definitely unwarranted and misleading. You can run most of your basic windows applications with wine. Openoffice is an excellent replacement for office the odt and odf ane now world standards in some countries and microsoft has accepted the same too. So i do think knocking 100$ for absolutely no loss in functionalities is a pretty good offer.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Me criticize Linux? I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and I wrote several books about Linux. One of them is now free online at http://LowfatLinux.com . But no way would I say that most Windows users can jump to Linux and not have a learning curve. MS Office is ubiquitous, and it WILL NOT run under Wine. OpenOffice is a decent replacement, but it's not the same, and will require some re-training.

We have ordered the Pandora for our son. Does anyone have any comments on it? We are also using Linux on all three computers in our house. I think the market share studies are underestimated. How can they accurately count free downloads?

EDITOR'S NOTE: When you visit a website, the standard connection protocol reveals your IP address, operating system and browser. Large sites such as Google or Yahoo can easily sift this data to get a good idea of how many people are using a given OS or browser.

Last February I bought an eeePC. Its small size and durability make it great for keeping a travel journal. I also bought the Incipio adapter set and last month my husband was able to do "on the scene reporting" while on safari in Kruger Park by plugging it into the cigarette lighter. I see the lack of a hard drive as a benefit since the flash drive can handle the knocks and bumps of travel. All we need to be able to do is write, send e-mails and look at our photos and this little machine fills those needs. So, really ... it depends entirely on your needs.

My Acer One Aspire, $399 from Amazon w/free shipping, can't be beat! It's perfect for travel in the car or on the cruise ship. At 7"x9.5" & 2lb. it is easily hand-carried or fits in my small camera bag. At $399 I have Windows XP, 1Gb memory, 6 hour battery, 160Gb HDD, built-in wireless & webcam, SD slot, & 3-USB 2.0. With an external USB CD/DVD drive I added Acrobat, OmniPage LE, MS Office, Photoshop 7.0, & DeLorme Street Atlas with GPS. (It sits on my dashboard while I drive & gives me voice directions) I use a Canon USB Scanner for FULL office capability while in the car or away. I love it!

> It seems to have started with the One Laptop Per Child project,

I had an Acer Travelmate back in 1999 that was similar size. Only 3GB but that was when laptop hard-drives were not much bigger. External CD and floppy drives. Nice little machine but ran out of space for programmes.

Picked up the AspireOne from Acer for $349 at Costco. Blue, lightweight. 120 Gb HD, 1 Gb Ram, Win XP. Works. A bit of a pain to load software, but this is not to replace my desktop or laptop for heavy work. Perfect for traveling, attending meetings. Just need to realize it is a "little one." What is not to like?

I have the Asus Eee PC2 with Linux ("Debian" maybe??) and I find the keyboard is too small so that I rarely if ever use it. Plus, I suspect Linux Ubuntu is far nicer than whatever version is in mine. I don't like this version of Linux.

EDITOR'S NOTE: There's nothing stopping you from reformatting and installing Ubuntu...

I purchased an ASUS eee pc1000HD a month ago. I have fallen in love with it. Things I like include a keyboard with a good feel in minumum size for my XL hands, WinXP OS to make it compatible with the programming that I use in a couple of hobbies (not available for other OS's), light easy to use and totally unobstrusive while using it in public places, battery life long enough to take for the day without bringing along the charger and besides, it's just plain cute! I've had no problems with it in loading programming without a CD/DVD drive. Simply transfer to a memory stick, name it the volume of the original installation disk and press on with the installation. Granted it doesn't do everything I did on my 17" desktop replacement, but that was not my purpose. As a travel handcarry for the basics it's darn near perfect. Biggest difficulty is wresting it away from my granddaughter so I can use it too!! [:D]

I own 3 ASUS mini-laptops. 2 with Linux and 1 with Win XP. I absolutely love them. My student son uses one where he is in Australia and we Skype each other with the other one here in the USA. I think that the best part of these laptops is that there is no hard drive and the flash memory drive is so rugged that I even dropped one of them when it slipped out of my hand and landed on the carpeted floor. I expected it to be dead, but I didn't even lose the Internet connection and all of my files were intact and accessible. I couldn't believe it. I've also used them in the car and I don't worry about potholes or rough roads since there are no moving parts (in the hard drive) to get damaged like a regular laptop. The other key feature that I like is that I bought the 901, which has the Atom processor, and it uses so little power that I can leave the unit on for 6 hours and not have to plug it in. I travel a lot for work and wherever I go, someone will invariably come up to me and ask me what is the brand of my laptop. I won't bother with a desktop anymore and I don't go anywhere without my ASUS anymore either.

I too have the eeepc, xandros, hook up wireless to the network and access the NAS. The Xandros, that comes with it, does everything that 90% of the people whant to do. I have openoffice 3.0 Gimp Firefox Thunderbird some games. a USB Tuner i can record TV, rip DVDs and edit photos.

I have added 2gig mem, Touch screen, 4-16 gig usb drives set up as a raid, and a wireless mouse and keyboard dongle. All of this internal.

Who says there is no room in these things.

The only drawback I have is that my $35 5 year old paper scanner wont work with it. Time to get an HP - eeeuser.com says that almost every model just works.

I beg to inform you that I regularly watch film DVDs on my EeePC; it is just a matter of running DVDRip to transfer the film onto a SD card, and the films thus transfred are less fragile and less bulky to carry around than the original DVDs.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Clever solution! But if I may nitpic, you're not really watching a DVD, you're watching an SD card. :-)

OK, so I'm not really a prude, but since I read this newsletter at work the cheesecake picture is a problem. Nice looking women, but the picture doesn't give me more information on the topic, but does make me wary of opening more newsletters from Bob. My mantra about graphics, particularly on the web, is "educate don't decorate!"

EDITOR'S NOTE: Of course the photo is educational, It shows the size of the laptop relative to other objects. :-) But to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I've replaced it with another photo.

I bought an eeepc for my son. It as 16Gb of memory + an additional 8GB with a plug in SD card. Make sure you convert yours to run in Advanced mode (details can be found on the internet [Google: Advanced mode eeepc]). Absolutely perfect for hacking. Very robust as well since it does not have a hard disk.

I have an Acer Aspire One with XP and a 160 GB hard disc. There is much talk about small keyboards, but for female hands I think they are OK. It is my third notebook but the first I really can carry with me. Next I will puchase the 6 cell battery!

You did not comment of the battery life or power consumption issues on these so called palm top computers. Surely the readers would like to know more on this very important issue also.