I'm looking for a netbook in the UK, preferably with Ubuntu pre-installed

[scratman]

Hi guys and girls, I hope somebody can help me!

OK, so after a prolonged period of unemployment, I have managed to get a job, clear my debts, and can now afford to be a little frivolous. My work is about 90 minutes commute each way, and I'm travelling on public transport. I have an MP3 player, and I do a fair amount of reading, but I'd love to be able to grab a cheap netbook and watch a few videos a couple of days a week. So, does anybody know where I can get a fairly cheap netbook (around the £200-£250 mark, although less would be preferable) which has a decent sound card, good screen quality, and battery life of at least 3 hours? I'd also prefer that it was shipped from within the UK, as I don't really want to wait 4 weeks for the thing to arrive if I can avoid it.

I'll also be using it as a party jukebox for barbecues, hence the desire for a respectable sound card, although the storage needn't be large as this music will be streamed from my main PC or my Spotify account.

My only other proviso is that it does not come with a copy of Windows pre-installed, as I won't be using it, and therefore don't want to pay for a license I'll never use. Another version of Linux, or no pre-installed OS would be absolutely fine.

So, does anybody have any ideas or recommendations?

[fatality_uk]

Not many smaller companies do NO OS or Linux but Dell still do.

http://search.euro.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=uk&l=en&cs=&k=ubuntu&cat=all&x=0&y=0

Ubuntu pre-install and support for both.

[scratman]

I had a look at the Dell models listed, but wasn't too impressed at the prices. What do people think of this offer?

http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/shop/detail.asp?ProductID=5720&CategoryID=404&SubCategoryID=

[sanderella]

I had a look at the Dell models listed, but wasn't too impressed at the prices. What do people think of this offer?

http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/shop/detail.asp?ProductID=5720&CategoryID=404&SubCategoryID=

It looks nice. :) Good price. Be interested to know how you get on with it.

[ugm6hr]

Do they still do an Ubuntu Mini 10?

It does seem like most UK devices are either XP or W7 these days. Which is a shame - my Mini 9 is fantastic, and bought for just £185 with Ubuntu about a year ago (perhaps longer).

Since then, I have bought my dad an XP Compaq Mini and manually installed Ubuntu, since it was a cheaper deal than any Linux version I could find. Sad, but true.

[scratman]

Hi again, guys. Not seen too many other places offering netbooks around this price mark, will be heading into town to see what the netbook is like, and how well it performs. Got a 16Gb Memory stick that I can use in the thing to increase the storage space, so will take a few videos up to see what they play and sound like. Will feed it back when I know more. Anybody know any other places I can get a cheap netbook?

[Kai69]

Try laptops direct I brought an Asus eeepc 1000H a few weeks back from them and they delivered 48 hours later
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/GRADE_A1_-_Asus_Eee_PC_1000_Netbook__-_Black_A1-EEEPC1000H-BLK067X/version.asp
Or you could try Novatech Ive asked around and as a UK company they have a good reputation
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/Laptops/Novatech/NNB-826S.html
I dont usually worry if or what OS in on my PCs I just put on what I want anyway :P

[ugm6hr]

Sorry - I missed the Morgan link last time.

That is a pretty good offer for a refurb device. The 8GB SSD is not an issue - my Mini 9 has the same. Just use an SD card for personal storage - they don't even stick out of the case.

512MB RAM is a little light, but probably enough for simple use. For sound - just use external speakers - the card itself will probably behave as well as many MP3 players.

An excellent offer - even 2nd hand (i.e. non-refurb) they would probably be a similar price.

[scratman]

Hi guys and girls. Got the netbook, ordered it on Monday, was in the house on Wednesday, very happy with the delivery time. As for the netbook itself, God it's sexy!!! It's light as a feather, comes with a version of Fedora installed and sufficient applications to get you up and running.

There are not enough codecs installed by default for my liking, but that's probably easily resolved by anybody familiar with Fedora. Personally, I'm not, and wanted Ubuntu Netbook Edition on it, so I stuck my Netbook ISO onto a USB stick, booted it up (booted VERY quickly, sub 1 minute from power on to login screen from my USB drive, quicker still when I got it installed fully!!) Type in my network password, install a few codecs/updates and Robert's your mother's brother.

The wireless card is faultless, picking up networks my I can't see on my desktop with the Belkin wireless card attached to it, it even got 95% reception from the bottom of my garden, 40+ feet and 2 solid stone walls away! I've no idea how, but I'm very impressed with that.

Streaming Youtube over my wireless, I had the following system stats:-

CPU1 68% CPU2 63% ( I didn't realise it was dual core....)
Memory 196.8MiB (40.5%) of 485.8MiB
Swap 126.2MiB (9.9%) of 1.2 GiB

The netbook also has a dedicated SD card on the left side designated "Storage Expansion" which will probably have a 16Gb SDHC card residing in there permanently, I might even have another in the Memory card Multireader that sits on the Right side. It even has three USB ports, so it I were to fill those with three of my 16Gb USB pen drives it would cheerfully make up for what could be a deficiency in the 8GB SSD drive, you could easily make it up to 88Gb and get change from £200 all in.

The webcam worked flawlessly in the supplied Fedora operating system, but did not work out of the box for me in UNE. Opening Terminal and typing gstreamer-properties did enable me to get the cam to work, so it's supported by Ubuntu, and Cheese can get video on the screen but I've still not worked out webcam chat with it, so far but I suspect it may be an Adobe Flash issue, I'll let you know when I resolve it.....

Battery life was impressive, over 2:30 usage before I thought it was time to get concerned, and during that time I had been running updates and several applications, so the claim of 3 hours appears to be reasonable.

All told, I'm very impressed. It comes with VGA-Out, built in webcam, microphone and tolerable speakers for a little audiological stimulation, the sound card seems adequate, but I'll be giving that a thorough test over the next couple of days in preparation for a weekend garden party. It also has a microphone input on the soundcard for those who need it. The previously mentioned 3 USB slots, dedicated SD Card slot and Multi-Memory card reader seem frankly decadent, switchable wireless just seems like a good idea. It even comes with a case for the laptop, full instructions book and a DVD with which you can create a bootable USB drive to restore Fedora should things all go wrong. Honestly, at sub £140 including VAT and delivery, I cannot imagine what more you could want.

This is a great buy, I urge you to grab one while you still can!!!

[NightwishFan]

That does sound like a nice thing to have. I am glad it worked so well for you.

I have a question. Is around 3hrs normal for a netbook? I thought they would get much better life, even if active. My 15 inch Asus laptop even gets around 2hrs active, and 4hrs if I am just browsing with music.


... and Robert's your mother's brother.

Never heard that before, gave me a :lolflag:

[scratman]

Hi Nightwish Fan,

3 hours seems pretty standard for a netbook that you're paying under £200 for. To be honest, 3 hours is ample for me, 2 would easily be sufficient so I'm happy with 2:30+ at the price I paid.

Oh, as a side note, this system will cheerfully run Spotify through Wine, which was a nice little surprise! :D

Currently got Spotify playing, a few tabs in Firefox and a couple of applets running, and I'm siting around the following marks:


CPU1 25%
CPU2 30%

Memory 221.1 MiB (45.5%) of 485.8 MiB

Swap 23.1MiB (6.1%) of 378.0 MiB

I'll take that!

[Johnsie]

Argos have an eeepc with n270 processor 160gb hard disk for £200. Seems like this user paid extra not to have windows and ended up getting not as good a computer. Cutting off the nose to spite the face?

[amitabhishek]

Check out MSI Wind U135 netbook. Comes with Suse+Moblin combo. Reasonably priced (INR 15K~GBP230)!

http://blogs.computerworld.com/15364/new_suse_moblin_linux_netbook_from_msi_arrives

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8580841178.html

Edit: Overlooked you post; congrats!

[scratman]

Hi Johnsie. I did have a quick look at the netbooks on Argos, but to be truthful, I wasn't too impressed. Don't get me wrong, the deal is good, but that netbook in particular was not what I was looking for.

What I was looking for was something with a hard drive large enough to install the OS to, with no objection to streaming data to my laptop in the home, and using USB sticks/flash cards for my personal files, media etc when on the move. I have a small stack of large (8, 16 & 32 Gb) SD cards, and a few Pen drives of equal sizes which I bought at auction for a business that was closing down. This netbook ticks all of my boxes, given the connectivity options (3 USB slots and 2 SD Card readers). OK, so 512Mb of RAM is a touch light, but it's sufficient for my needs, I have a desktop for intensive applications, and the dual 1.6Ghz core processors mean the machine clips along at a more than acceptable rate.