We find ourselves on the road a bit too much to be as netsavvy and gadget freaky to not be able to have some productivity happening while out and about. I believe a netbook is an economical means to fill that connectivity hole our family stumbles into far too often. Do you have any suggestions, recommendations, or warnings on netbooks, brands and operating systems?
Via Twitter, I’ve learned that Dell solders memory into the netbook making them not easily upgradeable. I now know about http://www.netbookreviews.net/ thanks to xempt who also recommends NewEgg (a favorite shopping spot of mine). Jfloyd pointed out that lspegman has a Hackintosh netbook with a "few glitches but no biggie." steverb says netbooks are 90% the same hardware and gives kudos to Dell’s keyboard design. svandyke likes the ASUS eee (the company we must acknowledge as breaking the barrier for netbooks) and points to C|Net Reviews. ceffyl1 loves her Acer Aspire One D150. jeanroy gave a TweetBrain response (oops. I accidentally closed the question) with good links:
Here are some great links on netbook reviews. http://www.netbookreviews.com/ http://www.netbookreviews.net/ http://www.laptopmag.com/ http://reviews.cnet.com/best-netbooks/ I hope this helps your question. Please follow me on twitter when you get a chance. www.twitter.com/Jeanroy Thanks =D
Asus eee comparison chart.
The Acer Aspire One also works well as a Hackintosh 🙂 You can also find a list of support for OS X86 on netbook hardware here: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/12/17/osx-netbook-compatib.html
I know that my geek network admin security professional boyfriend is going with an eee pc from Asus in September. He really likes Asus. After seeing how craptastic our two Dell laptops are (they swore they’d contact us when it was time to extend the warranties), I’m not sure I’d buy a dell again if I didn’t have credit with them.
I did a little bit of looking at netbooks about a month ago when I thought I was going to have to replace my computer (I ended up just needing to install a new harddrive so I didn’t buy the netbook). As people have already said the Asus and Acer were probably the top two that I would have considered. I did see that BestBuy apparently has a custom version of the Asus that is NOT the same as the main one that everyone is so happy about. Pricewise it looks like a good deal, but I would check the specs carefully before purchasing from them.
That’s what I’m learning. There are 33 suppliers of netbooks worldwide with 1 in the United States, 2 in Hong Kong, 2 in Taiwan, and 28 in China. The differences can be very subtle from memory soldered instead of slotted to type of display or lack of blue tooth which makes judging which sales are truly good deals or not rather difficult. For example, read about the differences between the HE and HEB:
What normal consumer asks, “does this price include the 2.5mhz wireless n or the 5mhz wireless n?” All the average consumer sees is a few dollars savings.