Category: accessible Devices
So, I'm looking to purchase a netbook (or a "sub notebook", as I learned they can be called from the fantastic sourse that is wikapedia). Does anyone have any suggestions? obviously I want one that isn't too sight-oriented (so no touch-type keyboards or stuff like that). I'm currently looking at the HP Vivienne Tam, but am open to other suggestions. I am assuming that I can just install jaws on the vast majority of them? is there other stuff you guys think I should consider?
Thanks in advance, and I apologize if this should have been posted on the geeks are us board; I thought this was more appropriate.
Alright; recommend away!
I'm using an MSI Wind U100 netbook. I'm sure this is not MSI's most current model, but it works for me. Runs Windows XP, ahs three USB ports, a built-in card reader, and so forth. If the keyboard on a netbook concerns you, you can always get yourself a USB keyboard for about ten bucks like I did. Since this is my main and only computer, I mostly use it stationary, so I just plug in a standard keyboard and type away. Also, the little tiny speakers in netbooks are very tinny and trebly, if hat's a word, so you may want to get yourself some sort of external speaker set, even if it's just one you can plug into the headphone jack. I'm not a Jaws user, at least not primarily, but it will run on such a system as well as any other screen reader if you want to try NVDA or one of the other ones. I also like to use Microsoft Security Essensials for my anti-virus, as it's not a resource hog and works in the background and seems accessible to all screen readers. You will need to get an external CD/DVD drive if you ahve stuff you've saved on CD or DVD or if you need to load programs from a CD. The one I got was about 80 bucks, so consider taht extra cost. Oh, and try to get a machine with a six or nine cell battery if you intend to go portable. A three cell will only give you a couple hours of time. I'm told the Asus computers are quite battery-efficient.
I agree wit the last poster's commint and ya Asus is a alsome bran of netbook. I have one and do use it.
I have a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012. It's a great bargain, you can feel the keys and you can expand the memory up to 2 GB. They have all the other stuff as posted, and you can order it with XP or Windows 7 Starter. Sense you can run 2 GB on it I'd order Windows 7 starter and upgrade to Windows 7 home. Mine only have the 3 cell battery, but you can get up to 6 cells for around 400. The lower model 279 works beautifully and I have had no trouble connecting to wireless WI Fi anyplace it's available. I think all speakers on these suck, so as suggested a headset or external speakers either USB or plug in to the earphone jack.I think if I paid more then 350 for one I'd just get a 13 inch laptop. More expandable, and not all that much larger.
price wise, look wise, praticle wise, i'll suggest go for any of the assus modle. specially the later one that come with either 6 or 9cell battery. they usually come in around 10.1 inch, a good little machine that last you for anything between 5/9hours battery usage before you needing to charge again. it can stratge longer than that if you don't have your wireless, and having monitor off or things like that. the keyboard is great, only problem i have so far as long as keyboard goes, it don't have a home and end key, instead they replace it with some retarded key like quit screen who do nothing.
also, most netbook speaker isn't great. as some posters suggested, that can easily fix by getting an external speaker, or headphone or something similar.
i own a Asus 1008PE, come with 250GB harddrive, window7 startor, 1gb ram. i'll give it 8 out of 10
man this is great b.c my husband is going to get me a net book for my b-day and i was wonderin what was a good one to get...keep on with the posts
Acer netbooks I think, are the best ones I came across when I was on the hunt for a new laptop or even netbook myself. I did consider Asus, but with Asus see, it looks something like your 4-year-old sister would watch her Barbie DVDs or have fun with the Fisher Price internet link thingy to keep her amused while mummy's busy elsewhere, lol. I was going to go for the Asus 1201 dual core sub notebook, but instead, went for this Acer Ferari One-200 netbook, cost me around $800/£423 from buyitdirect, but it was the last of the line with this particular model sadly, though I daresay they are still a few brand new ones around in the US of A. Unlike my last Dell then, this baby's been running as sweet as a nut for the last hmmm, 5 weeks or so since mum finally found the time to help me get started with it. Very sturdy, solid, none-squishable netbook, not like my old Toshiba or Dell practicly full-size lappies which depressed at the lightest touch on the wrist rest or keyboard. Now Acer have done a couple of blimming brilliant things which is one of the main reasons why I went for this netbook, there is not just one, but two, SoDim slots, meaning you can run it on up to 4 GB of Ram, I'm running on 3 GB of Ram at the moment, but I am considering either, getting someone from Acer to upgrade to 4 GB for me or whizzing it over to our local PC World for them to replace the 1 GB Ram with another 2 GB of Ram, because the netbook does sometimes struggle to keep up when loading webpages and stuff with JAWS, Qwitter, WLM and stuff also running in 2 or 3 other windows. Other than this very minor setback though, this netbook also boasts 250 gb hdd, also expandible with the aid of the built-in card reader. I haven't worked out how to do this yet, but you can apparently combine those two volumes for a little bit of extra hard drive space. I have a 16 GB SD card in there now ready for just such a purpose as that was just lying around going spare before I purchased this netbook, lol. Processor? AMD Athlon L310 64 bit capable, 1.2 GHZ/2.4 GHZ as its dual core, lol but still fairly fast all the same. Boots up in no more than 35 secs on a fantastic day, add 20 secs on not such a good day, lol, shuts down time? hmmm, 20 seconds, with a little bit of help from Auslogics and Piriform and various apps and programs they have to offer. Those were the main reasons why I go for any netbook or laptop of these specs when its needed. Netbook runs Windows 7 home premium, 64 bit. Would be nice if you could choose between 64 bit and 32 bit, since even I'm not up to reinstalling 32-bit Windows 7 home premium just yet, lol. Netbook does not have built in bluetooth, something which might put some people off it, but it does have more or less everything my old 15-inchDell Studio 1537 had, even though that particular machine had a hell of a lot of issues in the 1st month alone after I bought it, which is why I felt a change was necessary. O and lastly but not leastly, I neglected to mention Acer's fine tip, larger than average keyboard. Acer had yet another clever trick up their sleeve and designed a netbook keyboard who's keys are larger than even a lot of desktop keyboards, making for very comfortable typing with heir unique light touch or fine tip keyboard. Best netbook out there, despite all the formula 1 Ferari branding, trust me!
Jen.
The Dell can have Bluetooth built on and does not struggle with pages and such even if I am running 3 or 4 programs at once. It has the new adam 456 processor, so I wonder why the suggested one before me does? It seems to have plenty power, so that is interesting. Expensive though, but.
personally, i won't go with Acer. have had lots of problem with them in the pass from destop to laptop, not only thru my personal experience, also thru experience from friends and family.
i believe Acer netbook have a better sound system than most netbook, however, from the outlook, praticality, price point, value, and also, for most leading review such as choice and CNET did not rate Acer in general as to something great. of course, there's always a couple of models get acception on that.
personally, from all my computing experience, i would suggest these few brrands to consider in general...
Samsung, Toshiba, Dell, and Asus.
in terms of netbook, i'll choose
Asus as first,
Samsung or MSI
Dell
Toshiba and Acer will be the last
Dell does have great notebooks and destops, however, i don't think their netbook is up to the best yet.
regardless of what you choose, it could only be better in the very near future.
if you aint in any hurry of getting one, i'll urge you to wait for another couple of months, for the new series of netbook to relist.
at the main time, perhaps the question to ask is what you seriously looking for in a netbook, and what you will use it the most.
I wouldn't recommend Dell myself, since the hard drive on my last laptop was corrupted almost from the word go, the DVD drive and not 1, not 2, but 3, keyboards had to be replaced due to broken key clips in the year or so I peresevered with it, then, to cap it all, the engineers came out and broke both audio jacks plus the card reader when putting in a new motherboard which also died on me, so Dell? no ways! Do not, touch them with any barge pole, length doesn't matter, lol. Acer Ferari netbooks or sub notebooks rock! As I said in my previous post, she's been running as sweet as a nut for about 6 weeks now, since I started using her, whereas with the Dell Studio 1537, 6 weeks after getting that, the first of 3 keyboards, had been replaced and the DVD drive had been replaced. Not good times.
Jen.
I was thinking of getting this one (link below). Any thoughts? (and yes, you can tease endlessly as to my "fashionability" but I have a weakness for nice-looking things)
http://www.hp.com/viviennetam
Acer looks good to start, but god bless ya, hopefully it won't have any after sales problem down the track. their after sales is worse than any i've seen.
same goes with HP, look good to start with, but touch wood, hopefully you don't have any problem, their aftersales is better than acer, but not by much.
Crap I just wrote a whole big response and for some reason it failed and I lost it! Arg!
Anyway, that gold butterfly model is chic and pretty powerful! A bit pricy, but you are paying for that design. *smile*
Personally, I have always been a fan of the Toshiba models. They get great ratings on the web and are quite stylish. I love the keyboards and the price point is under $400.
I've used the Asus Seashell model, and it is pretty cool as well. Priced again under $400.
Good luck, it is always fun to get new technology. Let us know if you go for the Butterfly model. *smile*
The Vivienne Tam looks fine if the most important factor to you is appearance, and you're willing to spend the money. Otherwise, there are Netbooks that have higher specs and cost less.
I agree with Season. Dell however has just updated it netgbook line, so ready now. Any company and that is any can and will have production issues and someone might get a bad machine. People build them, so faulty will happen. But, will your company stand behind their product? The poster that doesn't like Dell had a bad machine, but Dell rebuilt it until it worked and they even send techs out. Most companies will only send parts, no installer, so. I'd price hunt in the brands Season posted, but as I say would not pay over 350. I'd just go with a 12 or 13 inch laptop.
Guys, is windows seven accessible with jaws? do you know wich versions? because I'm running jaws 10, and am worried about it being accessible. The people at best buy said it only came with windows7. Any thoughts?
jaws 10 works with win 7 to a point, but to get the best out of win 7 you'll need jaws 11.
this main machine of mine runs win 7 premium with jaws 11 and i have no issues with it.
Do you know in which ways jaws10 falls short? Thanks for the reply.
in list views is where's it's most noticeable, plus you can not access the system try. the insert f11 keystroke will fail to work. it's hard to explain the folder issue but it is noticable as i said.
I've posted on your question on your other board. Don't buy from Best Buy, or tell them to order you a Dell, or any other you want with XP. If not then buy some place else.
I'm running an asus netbook with win xp home sp3 and NVDA. I love it. samsung is shitty, because the first netbook I had was a samsung one, let's just say that the soundcard was so faulty it studdered at times when off the battery if I was on skype or something, and at times froze up completely to where the damn thing was unuseable by me. It was running win7 starter. I don't know how it is over there for you, but for me, we got the protection plan from best by on that netbook so all I had to do was take it back to them and I could replace that one with the one i'm using right now. They told me there at best by that asus was the bestout there, h p is sort of well, I don't know. You only get one audio jack which is a shared headphone pluss mick jack. One of my friends has one and the damn thing just messes up every time we try to talk over skype cause it just keeps muting itself all the time when she tries to plug in her headphones and we have to go tell it to unmute and everything before she can even atempt to plug the things up. And as for dell, I have a dell laptop and desktop here, the laptop i'm thinking about selling next month so I can have the money to get myself a mack. Dell isn't all that bad, we've never had any problems out of them, accept for my laptop is one a them single cor systems with only like 448 megs of ram in it. But yeah, I'd go with asus all the way. Some of them do have xp home with sp3 like mine, some have win7. This one i'm using now already came set up to use classic views and things, skype was already installed on it an everything. So yeah, there's my brambleing. If my assistants is needed pm me or something and i'll be glad to help out in whatever way I can
The reason for the headphone issue is their is a program aded on the sound section for effects. Have her get sighted help to turn it off. It's in the system trey. It's not screen reader friendly.
Hi, great advice about JFW 11 and Windows 7. I'm thinking of getting a new laptop with Windows 7 on it. Also, does anyone use Jfw 10 or 11 on their netbooks? My older sis seems to think that Jfw will take up too much of the hard drive. Also, what is Nvid, Sorry probably spelled that wrong. I'm assuming it's another type of speech. If so, how do you go about acquiring it. I'd like a net book for long road trips. How's everyone's connectivity been? I have a laptop, but would like something smaller.
NVIDA? never hurd of it. unless you mean NVDA, that is a free an open sorce screan read for windows. You don't have to have that much memory to run NVDA, it's fast, and very easy to work with. as far as laptops go a friend a mine just recently picked up a quod cor laptop that had win7 64 bit, 4 gigs of ram in it, and like a 200 something gig harddrive, she got the damn thing for around 500 bucks. talk about a hell of a price, I can remember when laptops costed a hell of a lot more then that.
Laptops are lots cheaper, but to answer the question. I run JFW on my netbook and it doesn't take up much space at all, and my drive is only 160GB, but some netbooks are coming with 250GB now, so they are just as good as laptops as far as hard drive space. Mine had 1GB of ram out of the box, and it works great, but I upgraded to 2GB and it's a good as any cheap laptop. Now to get the program loaded you simply go to www.freedomscientific.com and download it. Sighted help for that, then if you select run it installs exactly as it does on any computer. If you don't want sighted help then you download it from a computer that has speech, load it on to a thumb drive, and on the site their is a version for this, and installs from their. Piece of cake. On mine productivity is wonderful, and so far in my city I can connect to many hot spots free, so I've not had to pay for access. Also my ISP offers support as well at many places, so I sign in with my phone number from home and my password and I'm on just like at home except these free WI FI are not secure, so don't do anything important on them, and if you just have to change your password soons you get to a secure spot. No financial doings please though.
Sorry, I meant Nvda. Sounds okay, I'll have to look into that.
If you have Jaws you can install it on more then one computer, so no need for NVDA It is free however and many people use it.
you can use system access to go to help you download jaws. just remember to type in www.satogo.com in the run dialog box.
as long as IE is the default browser, i don't think firefox likes SA to go all that much from what i've seen
no. it doesn't
actually financial stuff is one of the few things its safe to do over open wi fi as it an SSL connection just make sure your log ins are secure as well. one way to tell is to make sure it says https and not just http in the address bar.