Well, Duh

Netbook purchasers are disappointed that netbooks aren’t notebooks. This seems like a marketing failure. On the other hand, I guess they sold a lot of machines that they might not have otherwise. On the gripping hand, the retailers might have missed an opportunity to upgrade the customer by explaining the limitations.

7 thoughts on “Well, Duh”

  1. My main disappointments with the netbook I got are that (3) despite marketing a device with limited drive space, ASUS didn’t make all such models upgradeable — and (2) despite marketing a more streamlined operating system for devices with limited drive space, Easy Peasy still forces me to delete software from my netbook to have enough free space for the damn thing to boot up.

    Then again, (1) I could have found out about the lack of upgradeability in my particular model before getting the thing. Caveat emptor.

  2. I have a 1st run Acer with the built in air card and 160g hard drive. I use where wifi is hard to come by(car and rural). It works great! I put Open Office on it and have had no problems. The 1g of RAM has been suffcient so far. It fits in the pouch on the seat in front of me on airplanes so no overhead storage. It fit my needs to a T.

  3. Caveat emptor implies personal responsibility… what are you, some right wing nut job? 🙂

  4. I dunno. I love my MSI Wind, which I bought to replace a 2002-vintage Dell notebook. Overall, the netbook is about 4 times faster than the Dell, and it cost 1/6 as much. The netbook is also faster than my 4-year-old 2.8 GHz Celeron desktop–due mainly, as far as I can tell, to the fact that the desktop’s hard drive is a total slug.

    I really like the small form factor. It only took a couple of days to get used to the 1024×600 screen. 2Gb of RAM and 160 Gb of HDD space are quite enough for me. When I look at some of the luggables masquerading as notebooks these days, I wonder how people can bear using those big beasts.

    The ideal netbook would have one of those new transreflective PixelQi screens (I would retrofit my Wind with one of those in a heartbeat if a DIY kit were available); and a nice big SSD.

  5. I bought 2 eeePCs shortly after release in Australia. First one was 7″ screen version running Linux. Linux is great – except I can’t get the thing to talk to my 3G cellphone so I can use the phone as a modem.(I tried all sorts of things but Linux is opaque to me.) I think I’m about to get it to drive a large screen and use it as a second office PC as it boots in 30 seconds so won’t need to be left on all day.

    The next one runs XP and has a 9″screen, works with the phone and is all the PC I need while travelling to check email, check aviation weather, file flightplans etc. SSD so very robust. Also does all field servicing for our customers’ instruments. Great except XP slows it compared to the Linux machine.

  6. I’ve been finding my Eee boots up kind of slow even compared to my desktop PC. I’ve little doubt the lack of free drive space has something to do with that though.

  7. <grumble> Now I’m finding that Firefox is prone to crashing on the netbook. I never have gotten it to handle Flash-heavy sites like Youtube (it claims Flash isn’t installed even though it is).

    If I could expand the drive capacity and memory I’d consider putting XP on it just to be on more familiar ground, but I’m stuck with this Ubuntu-based distro that’s less satisfactory in its current version than it was before I updated it.

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