Category: Geeks r Us
Finally it feels great to be typing on a full qwerty keyboard located on a very small device.
After my disappointment with the Lenovo g450 ( See my review
) , I began to look for an alternative solution to my desire dream of having a solid laptop that I could use with ease during school and for my programming needs. I couldn't go out and buy a $900-100 high-end notebook, so I had to settle with the lower end of the market: netbooks!
<h1> Netbooks: Where did they come from? </h1>
I'm doing a
Radio show
on Netbooks - just what are they and where they did they come from? In 2006 and even the first half of 07, the idea of such devices was very low-spread ; Not many people even knew that such devices existed. It wasn't until the end of 2007 that the Netbook craze hit the market ; Yes, Asus was one of the first to develop a usable netbook model, though ssion was of course the corporation who coined the term in the late 1990s. (That's the company who makes symbian phones, folks)
In 2008, nearly 9 million netbooks were sold. The figure is expected to double this year - to 18 million. By 2011, companies hope to have 40 to 50 million netbooks sold.
Most analysts found it surprising that these small computing devices could make a segue into the notebook market - and to date, cut around 20% of notebook sales. Why? Don't people need laptops with great ram and high performance speeds?
Not so, it appears. Most people now a days want portability - and sometimes prefer it over power. And simply put, netbooks are not too bad. There is a biaas out there that they can't be used to perform heavy duty tasks ; like programming or installing Operating systems. While claims to this are valid, netbooks might actually be slightly more powerful than people imagine, especially if a ram upgrade is performed. You may, at a small cpu cooling risk, overclock the processor as well - up to 2.3 GHz, although that high power would require you use liquid nitrogen to cool your laptop. In fact, the asus EEE pc netbooks have the "hybrid engine", which is a bios feature allowing people to crack up or down their netbook Intel Atom processors - up to 1.8 GHz. That's 200 MHz more than 1.6 GHz - which could boost performance if you don't like the 1.6 GHz speed already offered by Netbooks.
And so we come to the system specs for a netbook with that statement. What are they?
Since Netbooks are so recent, most have the same, if not the exact, system specs as others. The only difference you will note in the wide range of models (offered by at least 7 companies: Hp, Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, and del), are the chassie designs. Some netbooks have an 8" screen, with the expense of a full keyboard. Others have a 10" screen and a thin body, making the keyboard and touchpad more flushed. Yet others have a full keyboard and slight thickness. Some have glossy covers and smooth edges, proan perhaps to more scratches. There are models with more of a rugged surface. The veriety is yours to choose from.
But you can safely say that most will come with an Intel Atom 1.6 or 1.66 CPU, 1 GB of ram, a hard drive up to 250 GB (or a solid state drive up to 64), an intel gm45 graphics card, and a choice of either Windows XP or Windows 7 starter. The lesser share of Netbooks runs on the Arm architecture, and usually uses linux as it's primary OS - since Windows does not run on Arm processors. (to be simple: Arm is what is used in many pocket PC devices and note takers for the blind).
Netbooks are very cheap. The one I picked up at Microcenter two nights ago cost me around $419 + tax, + I ellected to buy a $40 2 GB corsair DDR2 ram which is what most netbooks will use. That ended out to be about $570 - a price analagus to the g450 which, by now, is back in North Carolina, ready to be restocked. Overall, that's not a bad price - and I could have saved the $50 if I didn't purchase the ram stick. The lowest the Toshiba nb205 netbook will run for is $400 on Amazon - and even then, you'd still pay taxes on it, if your state and country require so. I paid $30 on Tax alone - my county requires 7% taxing.
Wait, did you say Toshiba nb205?
Before purchasing my netbook, I looked at reviews. I even went as far as asking my sighted friends, "does this netbook have a smooth surface? How melded in is the keyboard?" and having them respond to the pictures of them found on Amazon and elsewhere. I came across many models. The asus eeePC 1005HA was popular, #1 on Amazon - with a 10 hour battery life and 160 Gigs of HDD space. It had the smooth surface cover and the flushed in keyboard. The other blind student at my school also got this model, and thus I had the chance to feel it and use it for a while.
The toshiba NB205 caught my eye from the start. Ok, my ear. It was advertised as a netbook with a 9 hour battery life, bluetooth, Wi-fi, and a good keyboard.
There are lots of submodels to the nb205. Some, like the n301, do not have builtin bluetooth. Others, like my n330, do. Two types of keyboards exist in them ; One which is more raised and has disc films between the keys - and the other models which do have keys but no spacing between the rows of the keyboard.
I wanted Bluetooth, since my that is the primary way to access my cell phone's internet from the go, without the snagging of a USB port for a Bluetooth adapter.
<h2> The netbook: Purchasing </h2>
So it was that the same night of my netbook research, I went to Microcenter with my family, since they wanted to look at digital camcorders. I knew that the store would have a wide selection of netbook machinery on display.
And it did. From Asuses to Acers, Sony's to Toshiba's - Microcenter had it all.
Most, as said, had a flushed in keyboard and a smooth surface. I'm not personally a fan of the glossy-smooth netbooks do to their seemingly scratchable bodys. Although, this was not my personal primary lookout in a netbook model. I wanted a machine which had a full keyboard ; So that I wouldn't have to experience my whole "home key dilemma" issue I did with that Lenovo laptop.
There were two on display with a durable chassie. One was the Sony vioh ; the other, A toshiba nb205. From then on, it was a survival of the fittest competition. The vioh cost $40 more than the Toshiba, pricing in about $449. It had a full-sized keyboard, with nice raised keys.
However that cool keyboard had no home or end keys on it. That disappointed me.
Not looking forward to a similar experience I've had, I decided to rule out the Sony - and went with the Toshiba. The n330, as mentioned, also had builtin bluetooth, something I also looked for in models.
unboxing and configuring:
Let's dive in. The netbook came in a simple box, which took some time to cut open. Once it was, a casing contained the computer.
The battery was already preinstalled, although it had no charge in it. I had to plug it in in order to start using the Toshiba.
It came with Windows 7 starter. That's right: The lowest Windows 7 release there is. I'm not sure why they couldn't put Home Basic on, at least, which features slightly more software but no aero glass interface.
Starting it up was painfully slow. Once it did boot, I was placed into the preconfiguration screen, where you have to enter your username, computer name, and more.
After this, I was presented with the Windows 7 desktop (mind you, it took about 5 to 10 minutes just to get there).
Narrator was painfully slow at this point. I zipped out my external 1 TB hdd, and loaded JAWS from there. That also in itself took 20 minutes, since Norton Internet security began nawing at me to activate my "one month free subscription!".
That brings us to crapware.
Crapware, by definition, is a new term which aims to describe the preloaded trial and comercial software installed on computers. There are some PCs
which have none at all ; Yet others come with a whole arsinal of security suites, gaming software, and other offers.
This Netbook isn't crapware free, for sure. Opening programs and features revealed software like the Toshiba Eco utility, Toshiba Config Free, Norton Internet Security, Java, and more. Bleh.
If you want to use something to get rid of all that, I recommend
The free PC Decrapifier tool
Which will allow you to rid yourself of the junk with the use of simple to navigate screens. Really, it's a great tool.
ound 10 minutes. I also turned off system protection, to avoid restore point creation when new software is installed - this generally takes up space and more time to create a restore point each time you setup a program.
By this time, an hour or so passed, and I was exhausted. My benchmarking would start the next day.
Toshiba nb205 benchmarks:
I uninstalled Norton Security first thing, to replace it with Microsoft Security essentials. I also got rid of some of the toshiba utilities to hopefully speed up the device.
Next, I did a defragmantation on drive C. This took a
Benchmarking the NB205:
At school, the testing began. I took my power cord with me, just in case the reported 9 hour battery wouldn't last it's toll - but thankfully it did.
I found using the internet with this Netbook very interesting. While loading websites was easy, JAWS would often be sluggish when it came to typing, and websites would render a bit slower than on my other thinkpad laptop. (Today I installed some Windows 7 updates and this no longer is the case)
The sound is very unbarable: If you lift the nb205, you will see that the speaker is on the very bottom - which can be covered by your lap or desk, often degrading sound volume (though not by much). To simply put it, It's like a pc speaker's sound system: understandable, but weak and certainly not the speaker you'd want to listen from in a crowded hallway.
Yes, the battery did hold it's charge. I didn't go to standby at all all day, and at my school dismissal time of 2:25, I had 13% life left. Long live Lithium ion!
I never found the CPU too slow, either. Windows 7 can start up in around 20 seconds.
I think I might have a deffective hard drive, however, since from day 1 it has made weird crunching noises that sound like a bad sector - yet everything loads fine and Windows reports no bad sectors on disk. Very odd...
The keyboard was also easy to get used to, even though at first I had a bit of an issue with the key spacing. What's nice about the keyboard is that the f4 and f8 keys are marked with a dot (the Sony was like that too though) since there is no gap between f4 and f5. The home and end keys are located in the f key row - not arranged in a six pack, but rather integrated with the f keys. (f12, print screen, home, end, insert is how it is laid out).
Not bad, at least better than having no home or end at all!
Windows XP: Busted!
Later that afternoon, I tried installing XP, since the performace I was getting with IE was horrible. (at the time I didn't do the Windows update)
I went into bios by pressing f2, and chose Sata compatibility/legacy USB, so that XP could install with the external DVD burner I have.
It all installed fine, until I got to the end of my first reboot - where it gave me a "disk write error" message. Poof went that plan.
I then proceeded to install the factory configuration from the recovery DVDs I created using the included Toshiba Recovery Media creator tool.
Once the system recovered (that took about an hour!), it began to boot up and install the crapware I didn't want - so I whiped the Hard drive again and went with installing my own Windows 7 all-in-one copy, choosing 7 Home basic during install. (I will probably upgrade this to home premium or ultimate soon)
Windows 7 installed in under 15 minutes as always, and I was again presented with the preconfig screen - where narrator had successful sound.
All it took was a simple JAWS install and defrag after that, + a disk cleanup run.
Ready boost: boosting your netbook performance
Ready boost was a feature of Windows introduced in Vista. It is great to use - with a USB flash drive or sd card, you can extend performance by utilizing it as virtual ram. Great, eh? I stuck my 8 gig class 3 Sd card in the included SD slot, and off I was with 4 gigs of external "memory". (although, ram is always better than ready boost).
Other OS experiments:
I tried to install other operating systems. First was my Leopard install - which ran fine, and I had sound, though it only came through headphones. Leopard didn't have wireless or bluetooth capabilities however.
Ubuntu also worked fine, with network detected, and as a result, so did Knoppix.
Conclusions:
I believe I have finally found the perfect laptop replacement for myself. Netbooks are fairly new in the market, and no doubt they will begin to increase in performance rapidly, after which I can certainly see them replacing actual laptops - Though this feet might be a few years away at most. They are lightweight, and unlike the netbooks of the past, most offer at least 8 hours of battery life - a huge jump from the three or four hours they had back in 2008.
Obviously these PCs aren't designed for graphic editing or CPU intensive tasks (like heavy dvd-ripping), but they do many tasks ranging from simple editing to even playing some past-era games. This is shown by the 2.0 experience index rating of the Atom CPU by windows 7 ; and the 3.0 Gaming graphics ratings. Wow. (hey, at least the CPU isn't 1.0 ! )
For most users, netbooks should be efficient for their needs - even to some of the higher-end nerds and geeks. Since the visually impaired don't play graphical games, I highly doubt that I would have needed a video-gaming laptop, anyway. I'm certain that I will be sticking with this Toshiba nb205 for at least a year to come.
-Tomi
November 19, 2009 - November 20, 2009
What is your conclusion on xp or windows7 on this netbook? Mny of them have windows7 starte on there. Do you recommend one purchsing the full version of win7?
Am I understanding that the performance was somewhat lacking with the xp? If so, this is very disappointing!
BTW, this is the exact netbook that I've been drawn to for months! And for those of us with some sight or the fully sighted, these little machines are beautiful! It is certainly tought to decide on color! The design is gorgeous!
PS. I was worried about the sound, but isn't that the case on ost of these netbooks? Was the sound fine with headset?
well. I couldn't install XP, it gave me a "faild to read disk" error during setup. I tried 3 different disks and even with all the compatibility I couldn't get it up.
7 runs fine on it, provided you update to the latest security updates :)
Performance with XP might be better though I doubt by much - it's already very decent using windows 7.
Yeah... I use headphones most of the time. the soundcard is a very good one - it has a realtec high definition audio device which I can also use for radio show hosting :) The speakers are a disappointment, but then again I use headphones a lot. Most netbooks do not have good speakers though, since their size and components aren't too expensive. :)
Hey now, I play graphical games. haha. Thanks for this, the only reason I'm not a fan of these are that the keyboards are just too small for me. My mom has a dell mini9, and I can't stand using it. The keys are just too flushed together.
yeah, I know... That's why I wanted this nb205, and I think it's really unique in the market with the spaced out keys.
Looking into getting my wife a netbook as well. I've heard good things about them, so I think that's what I'll do since they seem to work well with word processing and leisurely internet activities.
I actually bought my IBM Thinkpad X32 with a 2ghz processor, 512mb of ram (upgradable to 2gb), a 40gb hard disk and a screen size of about 12 inches, for $284 on Ebay. I chose it because of the brand and because it has a parallel port, a pcmcia slot, a special slot for type II compact flash cards, which is how I store all of my files, an internal 56K modem and built-in wireless connection. So it's a full laptop, though without an optical drive, in a small package. But the keys sometimes stick badly, most likely due to age or because I got something in them that I don't remember. I know when I first bought it, one key stuck and then, when I shook it gently, the stickiness moved to other plases. I would have just replaced the keyboard or taken it apart for cleaning, but I dropped the computer at least twice and now the fan sometimes makes a loud noise. Plus, I would want to upgrade the ram to 2gb, which costs at least $80.
So I'm thinking of either replacing my current IBM with another of the same or of getting a netbook. I had an Acer Aspire One, the 8.9 inch variety, which worked fine for a few months and then simply quit on me without me dropping it or getting anything in it. I bought it new. So I don't want that one again. I want an XP machine under $300 ($350 at the absolute most), sturdy, with a decent battery life (no less than three hours but hopefully over five), a screen size of 12 inches or less and without a touchscreen, a rugged/nonscratch surface, a built-in microphone and webcam (I don't really care about the quality of the latter/just need it for making youtube videos), and keys that actually stick up instead of being flush. I hate these weird keys that they use in many laptops today and want a solid one, but I don't care if the keys are smaller than those on a desktop. Still, I do want to be able to tell them apart. My IBM's keys are very nicely spaced, so if anyone has one of these, you'll know what I want. Home, end, page up and page down keys are important to me. As you said, the speed, ram and hard disk are pretty standard on netbooks, and while 1.6ghz isn't exactly 2ghz, it's still fine as is a 40gb hard disk. But the ram must be at least 2gb. I don't know of any netbooks with serial or parallel ports, pcmcia or compact flash slots or built-in modems but if one exists, please tell me. If not, then what is a good laptop for me, one that is actually rugged? I really want at least one of the slots and the parallel port for my printer. Also, the less crapware and the higher quality the speakers are the better. Mind you, I don't mean high quality like audiofiles do, but something that's not muffled when put on a desk is desired. I also wish to avoid sluggishness with NVDA and Firefox. Thanks.
40 GB is very small, that's going to fill up very quickly.
I back up everything to a 4gb compact flash card and it's still not full. My music is currently another 4gb but I use a separate card for that. My 40gb hard disk has at least 12gb to spare. So I must disagree. *smile* Still, a 60gb drive couldn't hurt. I have one of those on my HP Pavilion and never filled it up.
Wow! I think I just found my dream machine! But it's definitely not a netbook. The only problems are that the screen is huge, the computer is heavy and the site is in Pakistan! Ah well, I'll search on Ebay. I'm providing the description from the Pakistani site, since it's short, but am also giving the link to Del's description with all sorts of technical details.
Dell Latitude D610
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/nb_scrn_14more/latit_d610/pd.aspx?refid=latit_d610&cs=28&s=dfb
• Intel® Centrino® Processor 2.0GHz
• 1 GB Memory DDR II 40 GB Hard Drive,
• Optical Drive Dual Layer Super Drive Capable of reading and writing CDs and DVDs
• 14.1” XGA TFT LCD 1024 x 768 Display
• Lan, Modem, WI-FI, Infrared, Serial Port
• Parallel Port, 4 USB 2.0, PCMCIA Slot
• XP Professional Licensed
While they do make a port replicator, those ports are actually in the machine! Plus, you can upgrade the ram to 2gb and the hard disk to 80gb and add a floppy drive and a type I or II compact flash card slot! This is the perfect machine for both Windows and Dos! As a matter of fact, I believe the Dell Latitudes actually support DOS. Did I mention that the case is metal? It starts at only 4.67 lbs. but I just saw one that weighs 8 lbs! Ouch! Maybe, I'll use this as a full desktop replacement and get that netbook for playing around/going out? lol
I just read a very positive review of the Dell Latitude D610.
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2472
According to this review, the keyboard is full-sized and very solid, the machine is really fast and the battery life is fairly decent at four hours for a single battery, which can be charged in about an hour. It does have a strange noise when using headphones, but if that's the only real issue with it, who cares! Now all I have to do is find it on Ebay or somewhere else at a good price. Hopefully, it will have the right configurations for me.
At any rate, if someone doesn't mind the weight (remember that it varies according to options chosen) and the large size, this might be a better option than a netbook and can now be found at a comparable price as can the IBM Thinkpad X32, which is roughly the same size/weight as a netbook but more powerful. Sorry for getting offtopic. I just wanted to share what I've learned with you incase someone else was looking for something similar.
nice review on the netbook described here. Also hats off on describing asus netbook, I have one and love it. However, I have to admit when it gets home with me I plug-in my USB hub with all my gagets and its a beautiful laptop with enough power fore me.
How is the Asus when it comes to keyboard and battery life?
my netbook has 3 power level settings if its set to power saving I can get about 5 maybe 6 hours out of it. If its on high preformance setting I get about 4 hours and super praformance I get about 3 to 2 hours out of the battery. Keep in mind I have a dvd writer, 2 harddrives attached, a wirelsss keyboard, wireless headphones, a printer and finally a scanner.
Also I have not tried to run any other OS on it besides windows xp service pack 3 home. So with that I have no idea how long linix or a hacked verson of OS or fore that matter would handle its battery.