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After one of these PC notebook things- 10" or so screen jobbies for basic surfing/take away on work trips/when travelling for web access and conference write-ups.
Anyone any experience of these units, and any recommendations of them? Would consider second hand, but not sure if this is a good idea.
Cheers in advance.
P
I Use the ACER One, with Ubuntu. It's good enough
The 10" screen is ok-ish. However because the processors are slow I would recommend getting one with win xp or win 7. My OH has a 11.6" netbook and her mom has a 10" Acer. Acer with XP is much quicker then the 11.6" when it was running Vista. Now the latter is running win 7 and is not too bad.
Depending on Your budget I would shop around. Get the one with increased battery life, 8 hours battery life is in reality around 6-ish. You can get refurbs from Argos eBay outlet for £130-150 I would not spend more than that on a netbook.
If You want a more usable screen then consider 13.3" screen laptops with ULV processors. Much quicker then netbooks, screen is more usable and I'm very happy with my Travelmate Timeline. Has a SU9400 processor, switchable graphics, plenty of ram and hdd. Last abour 6-7 hours on battery. Cost me £370 new, rrp when it was launched was way over £700.
So depending on Your budget decide what You get. Samsung netbooks will be better made than Acer, but tbh not much between them. Always get the one with bigger capacity battery as a netbook with a 2-3h runtime on a standard battery is pretty poor. Up to £150 for a 10" netbook would be my max, more if You want a mobile laptop. I would only buy new, even if refurbished as there is not much of a price difference from SH ones and You have the peace of mind for a year.
Agreed on the budget thing. Like Charlie I have the ACER one and it's acceptable for basic stuff. I've watched a great many videos on it and it's fine for that. It browses and does email OK too but get a couple of things going at once and it dies. Battery capacity is poor. But then it cost me 120 quid refurb from the acer store.
Battery capacity is poor.
It is, but i bought a big one off amazon which gives me about 8 hours of web time.
Assuming you want a netbook rather than a light laptop,
The specs are largely similar, the variation is going to be in things like screen quality and keyboard (which vary wildly). Play with a few on display at PC World or some such.
One thing to look out for is there's a new dual core CPU out now, the N550. It whips the old ones.
Once you've picked your model, budget another twenty quid for a 2Gb SODIMM to upgrade it.
Acer Travelmate 8371 - 13" 8ish hours battery and 500gb disk, can be picked up for ~240