Hardware
Set up a Netbook on Sunday
Got my hands on an Acer Aspire netbook this Sunday, helping friends set it up for their daughter. Felt like a giant trying to work that tiny keyboard and 8.9″ screen (it’s barely bigger than my external CD burner), but for a ten year-old girl, it’s a winner.
One of the questions they asked before making the plunge was whether it would be fast enough. I hadn’t worked with this one before, but running the numbers, 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of memory, I felt confident telling them it would be faster than their current desktop (or my wife’s laptop). Sure enough, it’s a speedy little machine. Actually felt as snappy as my tablet with 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of memory.
Loaded it up with Firefox for web browsing, Gmail, calendar, and Google Docs; iTunes for her iPod shuffle; Picasa for photo management; AVG Free for security; Paint.NET for image editing; and OpenOffice.org for a local office suite (just in case of an Internet outage). With her Gmail account setup, I set up an unlisted web album for her via Picasa so she can share photos with family, and set up the Google Desktop sidebar with clock, scratch pad, photo album, battery meter, and wifi meter. Steered clear of any social networking stuff. Also made sure to turn on safe search in Google and parental controls in iTunes (and give her parents the necessary access). With the sidebar turning through photos and iTunes processing songs in the background, the web browsing experience was still very swift, even when working in Google Docs. I expect she’ll get a lot of use out of it.
Alan Robertson
06/21/2009 at 5:00 am
Have you tried Win 7 on a netbook? I’ve been running it for a month or so on my Samsung NC10 and it runs like a dream! Resume from standby is particularly speedy.
:-)
Glenn
06/22/2009 at 9:14 am
Sumocat,
“I like XP a lot, but I really don’t want to see it on new computers two more years down the road.” Why not? Because it is old? Does it lack any functional features? Is it merely an ascetic concern?