Netbooks

[Chris O'Connell]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to throw in my two cents about netbooks.

I bought an MSI Wind U100 about a year ago.  The machine is well designed,
but the components used are really cheap.  The two most problematic
components were the realtek wi-fi card and the touch pad.  The wi-fi card
wasn't a big deal, I replaced the card with an Intel card rather easily to
avoid any driver issues with Linux.

The touch pad was really a pain.  The Centillics <sp> pad had that annoying
tap-to-click feature that could not be shut off through the GUI or the
xorg.conf file.  Driver support was in beta and had to compiled into the
kernel.  After adding the driver to the kernel I found that the touch pad
would go crazy after the system woke up from a suspend.  I also had to do
some serious surgery to replace the touchpad with a Synaptics pad once I
finally gave up on the Centillics touchpad.  Also, the Synaptics pad was
only available from an ASUS parts distributor in the EU somewhere.  The
total cost of the pad was $50 after shipping and VAT (some sort of tax?!?).

I'm running my MSI Wind in a tri-boot configuration.  I run Mint, Ubuntu and
XP.  The battery life is good in XP, running about 2 hours on a 3 cell
battery.  The Linux distros do not hold up as well.

I can say the MSI is VERY durable.  I dropped mine on a hardwood floor from
about 4 feet of the ground on accident.  NO damage.  Perhaps just lucky, but
who knows?

The bottom line is that you get what you pay for I guess.  If you get the
cheapest possible netbook, ensure that the manufacturer uses a decent mouse
pad and be prepared to deal with wi-fi card issues if a decent card is not
installed.

Chris

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 8:00 PM, john saylor <js0000-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> hi
>
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > Which model do you own and like, or
> > have on your wishlist, and why?
>
> well, i have an asus 900 from over a year ago. so it's old in the
> world of netbooks.
>
> it's not the best computer that i've owned, and the keyboard took some
> getting used to, and my battery is shit; but i run ububtu netbook
> remix on it and am mostly happy with it.
>
> it's a bit like a toy, but i have always liked playing with toys. i
> started using it after my ibook got ripped off. it's very portable,
> and i like to think that the power consumption is minimal [although i
> don't know this for a fact] ...
>
> i use it for email and web and it's fine. i may try doing some music
> on it [chuck].
>
> i wouldn't think it's a high margin item, so the computer
> manufacturers are probably not that interested in promoting them ...
>
> it's a very utilitarian machine.
>
> --
> <sig name="\js" random_punctuation="(,::?" />
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