If I were to buy a netbook

[yagamihachi]

i'm using MSI wind dual-boot with xp. i love it. The negative thing is xp will double its boot time.

[earthpigg]

i have nothing to contribute to the hardware aspect of this discussion, but ill toss in that i have found crunchbang, the light edition, to be the best netbook distro out there so far.

-ubuntu based
-from power on -> desktop in under 60 seconds, sitting at 115 mb of ram usage. once you strip all the crud away, its at around 80.
-lite is better than normal, in my opinion. the normal edition seems to have suffered from "the .iso is only 400 mb! quick, add another 300mb of crap to justify a 700mb cd-r!"



that being said, i still think its to much. im playing around with a mini.iso command line install + lxde + synaptic + firefox + pidgin + ubuntu-restricted-extras + NOTHING ELSE right now... may remastersys it and share it.

[ugm6hr]

If you want it for college, I would suggest you have a go doing a reasonable amount of typing on the keyboards. I find that is the most important factor in using a Netbook.

My Dell Mini 9 is perfectly comfortable, and I use it 99.9% of the time over my 14.1" laptop for presentations, job applications, a couple of editorials etc.

Just get a decent size SD card for storage, or buy one with a proper HD.

As for your 2 choices, I don't know which is better. I have just bought a HP 10" for my dad, which he likes.

[gn2]

Also consider the battery life when looking at price.

In the UK the cheapest netbook is the AA1, but it has a small battery and doesn't last very long.

The MSI Wind does have an option for a large capacity battery and was the winner in a netbook group test recently in issue 121 of LXF magazine.

[3rdalbum]

The Linux edition of the Aspire One has a very slow SSD - it's quite annoying. And you can't *quite* run it on 512mb of RAM without having swap, which makes things slower.

The Aspire Ones are good machines, just make sure you get one with a hard drive, and you can pick up nine cell batteries from eBay.

[infestor]

in turkey netbooks arent that cheap, ½ the price of a decent laptop (also same in denmark).
i nevermind the hardware power but a tiny screen and keyboard is pretty annoying. only >=17" laptop keyboards (must be with a numpad) and screens are comfy enuff for me.
thats why desktop rlz, have my hardware in a crappy case; all my hardware except hdds, monitor fits in a mainboard box. pretty ******* mobile, huh?

[Phyxiis]

The Netbooks I was looking at had 160GB of harddrive, which is more than double my current laptop


I can see your point on the processor and the dual booting (which I have no clue how to do ). Dual booting would be good because I'm going for computer programming so having Linux and Windows on the same computer would be a godsend I believe.


Thanks for the feedback =)

[Phyxiis]

Also I would definitely be looking into buying a 6 (or if there's a 9 cell) cell battery


The Aspire One I was looking at hat big honking keys and it was a perfect size keyboard

[Lavaeagle]

Netbooks aren't built for word processing by the way.

Netbooks also don't come with CD/DVD-ROM Drives.

1. I work at Best Buy and that is one of the main reasons they exist for word processing and surfing the internet.

2. Very true you need the external disc drive.

3. Acer

4. Find the Asus one if you can much better than the rest of em.

[Phyxiis]

I was considering (sorry if links are not allowed):

Acer Aspire One
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/Descr...em_id=11090759


Asus Eee
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1218105184065

They both have 6 Cell batteries and 160GB HDD

The only thing that I would go with the Eee is the wireless B+G+N