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Sat, 11 Jul 2009 Since I'm going to be doing a bunch of travelling this summer, I decided I wanted a really portable computer. Now, netbooks are all the rage, but I abhor low res screens, and most of them are a paltry 1024x600—utter shit—so I couldn't really get one of those, right? Well... In the last couple months a new generation of netbooks has become available with higher resolution screens (1366x768) at reasonable prices. (There's also the awesome but stupidly expensive Sony Vaio P with the 1600x768 screen in 9", but I'm not shelling out for that.) At first I dismissed these as lacking, but then I considered that my 14" Thinkpad T30 is ugly but tolerable at 1024x768, so a 1366x768 screen in 10" probably would look pretty nice. Moreover, given that the T30 was previously my best option for travel, I'm going strictly upwards in res, portability, battery life, and modern niceities like USB2. Computing power might be a very small step back from a 1.8 GHz P4-M to a 1.6 GHz Atom Z530, but it's probably not more than 20% or so—plenty for a little travel laptop! Of the available models, I was most intrigued by the Dell Mini-10 and the Acer AO751h, which are more or less identical. The deciding factor was that I was able to get a refurbished Mini-10 for $330, whereas new both are about $450. Refurbs also have the virtue of shipping really quickly. The only wart in hardware support is that the Intel GMA-500 video driver is kind of a mess and only readily available under Ubuntu (but it does work for 2d and 3d basically right out of the box). Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu is better than anything RedHat based, but certain pieces of its not-Debianness are annoying as shit. At the end of the day, as long as I can run some combination of fvwm and xmonad (depending on my mood) and Anyhow, for $330 it really can't be beat, and I'm very happy with it so far. Of course, I'll post updates as events warrant. [ permalink | 4 comments ] |
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