PCA Forums

I've been toying with buying a netbook for travel. I got to play with a client's 10" Dell netbook the other day and decided that a 10" screen was as small as I was willing to go.

My other issue is battery life. I want the longest possible battery life.

I've done some research and so far this seems to be the best bang for the bucks.

Amazon sells it for $439 with free shipping: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001I45T9O/ref ... nkCode=asn

The reviews on Amazon on excellent and people are getting real-world battery times of 6+ hours. It also has a very bright screen which is a plus.

I haven't made a final decision yet, and if any of you guys can suggest another I'll take a look at it.

i haven't researched them at all...what are the primary limitations? do they run a standard XP install, or is it stripped down with limited software options? other than processing power...obviously i wouldn't want to install photoshop or something on one...but can you install whatever you like?

i would love one for work travel, especially if the drive is large enough. wireless and RDP/Citrix access, and maybe Office 2007 (but that can be done via the remote options) is really all i would need. hmmmm.

i like how the asus looks too...

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... e=10010482

All the netbooks have a standard install of XP Home but some services are disabled to improve performance and a lot of eye candy is turned off (Show windows contents while dragging is turned off and so are a lot of other things that I would normally turn off myself if I was going to tune it for best performance).

Otherwise it's plain vanilla XP. It does feel sluggish (like running XP on an old 800 MHz Pentium 3) especially on Flash-heavy websites.

Me personally, I would probably not run any anti-virus at all which would improve performance a lot, and run as a limited user and lock it down tight for security. I would disable the following services that practically no one needs (some may already be disabled): Clipbook, Distributed Link Tracking Client, Fast User Switching, Indexing, Remote Registry, TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper, WebClient.

This isn't going to be anyone's primary computer, but it makes a dandy travel laptop at 2.8 pounds.

If I'm correct, most of the components in the system should be made by Samsung. From my knowledge, Samsung makes LCD screens, hard drives, ram, and optical drives. This model doesn't have an optical drive though, think most netbooks don't to cut increase battery life. If you really need one, there is always the USB option. Though there is nothing to say that is 100% fact that most of the components used are Samsung made.

Please note the Ram is upgradable if you feel the need for a little bit more kick. Notebook memory is still fairly cheap for the DDR2 type. The majority of reviews are in the 5 Star category, though reviewing some of the 1 Star reviews could show a couple of hiccups you might experience. Most often 1 Star reviews tend to be from people complaining about a product not knowing what it was before buying it, or having insufficient knowledge to operate it properly.

Having nothing but good experiences with Samsung, I can't give you any personal reason not to go with them.

Reading from the reviews. I found someone installed World of Warcraft with its lastest expansion for giggles to see how well it would work. Not super fantastic, but playable if not in an overpopulated environment. Nothing to say this thing couldn't handle some older games without issues.

For the on the road laptop, I would certainly get it. The netbook has all the needed features, including bluetooth which you can use for many things including phone connectivity and video out via vga if needed. I would add more ram to it though, give it a little more headroom.

One more thing to point out if the Black model is the cheapest one, but the Silver-Nano keyboard is only available in the more expensive Blue and White models. But I am sure your mind is already made up, I bet you are going with Hot Pink. :lol

Just because I'm a cheap bastard, I have been loving the old Compaq EVOs with 12" screens. They are really light & have a 2 battery setup with a high capacity on one of them. Even off of old batteries, I usually get 4 hours of actual working use. They usually have around 800mhz-1ghz processor & support up to 512mb of ram. I just upgrade the hard drive & max out the ram & run with it. You'd be amazed by how quick one can run with a lot of the stupid stuff turned off & no Antivirus apps.