SillyDog701

[richard mitnick]

I am having a great deal of fun with the Acer 150-1635 netbook.

Netbooks are all the rage right now. Mine will do practically anything I do on my two C ore-2-Duo machines. the Atom N270 CPU which so many netbooks use is 1.6 gigs and hyperthreaded. So, I was doing three day-long music downloads and crunching on two work units at the same time. Many stores are constantly sold out. I got mine on line.

This is NOT a machine for gamers. This a machine for "the rest of us", who celebrate "Festivus", the festival for the rest of us.

But, if you are considering a netbook, and if you are a SillyDog Sojourner (hey- I just made that up) do not get one with a small flash drive. Many come with a 160gig hard drive and that is what you should buy.

If you are one of our people, you are going to find all sorts of things to do with that puppy. My planned use for this machine was travel; manage a humongus external hard drive of music, videos, and photos; crunch for BOINC & WCG.

But, FF was an xtra, Winamp was an xtra, I needed something to do word processing and spread sheets, so, with no optical drive (yet) I installed Open Office. Beyond that, I just have Zune and Music Match 10, and, egad!! I have filled 13 gigs. 13 GIGS!!, almost in my sleep.

Those little flash drives will leave you needing a big external hard drive. Correct me if I am wrong: most software seeks the C drive, whether you want it to or not.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Yoda has spoken.

Hari Krishna

>>RSM

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[Antony]

Thanks Richard for this thread.

I know that the portability is the key thing in netbooks. The compromises of smaller keyboard and small screen are the main drawbacks for me.

At home, I use my 24-inch iMac mostly, and there are times I feel my 15-inch MacBook Pro screen is a bit small, screen size wise. While travelling, I do find my 15-inch MacBook Pro screen is suitable. Having used 12-inch PowerBook G4 before, I'd say that 12-inch screen is really a bit inadequate if you need to do some heavy work.

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[Happy Dude]

My cousin's EEEPC came with a 160GB HDD, however only 10< is being used at the moment (she is only young)

The thing these days is that many programs have ballooned in size (Adobe CS4 Master collection uses 24GB on Windows!) and clearly noone was prepared for these netbooks with SSD's.

My laptop (Acer Aspire 5315) has 120GB, which is ... adequate most of the time. My desktop died because of a HDD faliure so I lost 80GB of space right there

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[Don_HH2K]

I'm considering the MSI Wind netbook for a project I'm working on with a local restaurant. Space is a prime concern, and the Wind seems to offer the best balance of size and trackpad that I could find.

I would probably never use a netbook myself. The screen and keyboard are too cramped for me; it's at those smaller sizes that I'd rather get a handheld with handwriting recognition.

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[richard mitnick]

Take a look at the photo of my digiteria on

http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_11074.php.

The post is on page six at the bottom.

You can just see the computer itself under the printer support I am using for the monitor.

The netbook is on the left, fleshed out with a keyboard and 20 monitor. I paid US$299.99 for the netbook, and US$129.00 for the Acer monitor.
The keyboard (USB) I had. I also bought a decent mouse. No need to be cramped.

So, for no more than about US$500.00, you can have a nice set up, albeit running WinXP, which is good until 2014.

>>RSM

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[Antony]

Take a look at the photo of my digiteria on

http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_11074.php

Are you able to use your netbook in closed-lid mode? (i.e. running while the lid is closed)

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[richard mitnick]

Antony-

I have not tried. I certainly can not turn it on with the lid closed.

>>RSM

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[PaulD]

"I certainly can not turn it on with the lid closed." - Thinner fingers, perhaps?
Check Control Panel > Power Options > (tab) Advanced
for various actions to occur (or not to occur).

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[richard mitnick]

Cool. Thanks, I will look at it.

>>RSM

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[Antony]

I certainly can not turn it on with the lid closed.

With PowerBook and MacBook Family, you can do the following:
(1) make sure the laptop is switched on and is plugged into an AC power source.
(2) connect an external keyboard and an external mouse to the laptop.
(3) connect the external monitor to the laptop, and set the video output to external monitor (making sure that the external display is active).
(4) close the lid.

That's it, and the computer should not go to sleep immediately once you close the lid. (It should go to sleep mode at your specified time, and can be wake up by clicking the mouse or keyboard.)


Using laptop in this mode has advantages as well as disadvantages. The advantage would be easier positioning the laptop, and less dust to clean on the keyboard. The disadvantage? Some people would be concerned about the air ventilation. (Among Mac laptop users, some said this is not an issue.)

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[richard mitnick]

Thanks. I am not sure about the sleep thing.

All of my computers crunch for BOINC and WCG almost 24/7. I think BOINC shuts down in sleep. I will go to BOINC and ask.

>>RSM

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