Netbooks

Tsutarja

Tsutarja

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    Some of y'all may have seen me discussing in the DCC last week about a netbook I acquired last week. So I want to know, how many of you guys have netbooks or have at least used a netbooks? What do you think about them? Any likes or dislikes you have towards netbooks?
     
    Why would you get a netbook...?

    I don't think there's really a place for them. They had a chance, but tablets kind of stole their thunder and now they seem pretty pointless. They were only ever useful for travelling and a tablet + keyboard attachment does that just just as well (if not better) nowadays. Plus, we have a lot of full-sized but very lightweight options that fill the gap between tablet and desk-based laptop. Macbook Air, Chromebook, etc. are all much more appealing to me than a netbook. A netbook is meant to be used as a temporary computer when you are away from your main computer and I think even phones do a good enough job of that now. They're expensive for little comparative benefit.

    I have an MSI Wind U100 that I picked up many years ago, intending to get a netbook for travel/school and then a decent desktop for when I was at home. Circumstances meant I had to use the netbook as my only computer for roughly a year and those were dark, dark times. The little thing did everything I asked of it (even Photoshop on my 1024x600 screen... god I was desperate!) but I don't think I could ever go back to it. I had a better time of it than most people, too, since I made sure to get a netbook that still had a full keyboard (just smaller sized) and I have the tiny hands to boot. But I can't imagine using that anymore.
     
    I find netbooks to be a lot more logical than tablets, given the fact that they're not tied down to some mobile operating system or stripped of the proper I/O that comes with a PC. For that reason they get to be in my book of electronics under the category of "full-fledged computers," unlike tablets, phablets, smartphones, smartwatches, et cetera.

    I owned two separate netbooks that carried me through some tough times over the past year, actually. Though, the majority of that time was spent with one netbook – a Toshiba – that was my favourite little thing despite having a broken hinge and a tiny keyboard. I typed so fast on that thing, too. Even maxed out the RAM capacity and put an Intel Cherryville SSD inside it so it could run Windows 7 okay!

    Eventually, I got a full-fledged laptop that had a big edge on that netbook. My Sony VAIO, this thing here, wasn't limited to the i686 (32-bit) instruction set, it came with 6GiB of RAM and could be upped to 8 (instead of shipping with 1GiB and going up to 2), it had a 16:9 768p screen over the netbook's tiny 1024x600 resolution, had Intel's VT-x technology that enables 64-bit virtualization, and also came with 4 native USB ports and a Blu-ray drive. So, I dropped the netbook in favour.

    During some of that time in between Iunet (the netbook) and Waset (the VAIO), I had another second netbook my cousin loaned to me that I dubbed "Iunet II." It was very similar to Iunet I, except it was an Acer instead of a Toshiba, and eventually... I slapped XP on it and gave it back so my cousin could loan it to her sister out-of-state. It was fun while it lasted I guess – I just toyed around with different Linux and Windows installs on it to see what it could handle.
     
    I'd totally love to have a netbook to play around - think of it as a way to see how exactly cheap computing is like. The kind where everything is as cheap as possible.

    Personally I'd love to get my hands on a "don't call it a netbook" ultra-low-cost laptops today, such as the HP Stream 11. They seem to be decent performers for what they are, but...

    To be honest, I'd rather get a Windows tablet at that point. It mostly has to do with the display. :)
     
    Tsutarja said:
    Honestly, netbooks could probably have more power to them than they already do. My Dell Venue 8 Pro runs better than a netbook in terms of processing speed, yet the netbook I acquired recently is slow even with basic web browsing.
    Click to expand...
    Try ecks-pee or lunix, then it'll run super-duper fast :^)
     
    Netbooks were relevant, then people realised that tablets had the same (or better) guts in a smaller form fact with a touchscreen like the iPhone. Then, people realised you can't do shit without a physical keyboard, and now it seems netbooks are making a semi-comeback. Now that the chips inside smaller budget laptops are capable of doing more than Word and maybe a couple tabs, I think that tablets with become more of a niche market while smaller, cheaper laptops become mainstream.

    As for my experiences with netbooks, I've used two. One is a eee pc 701, which couldn't run shit with it's old Celeron processor and 4gb ssd, but is ok with a light Linux distro. I also have a Packard Bell dot s which was pretty nice, had a spinning hard drive as well as a much better atom processer. The 1GB RAM was a huge bottleneck and the windows 7 starter it came with ran like hot garbage.
     
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