Legal Research

My First Week With a Netbook

I’ve been interested in netbooks since last autumn. I didn’t buy one at the time because I wound up getting my mitts on a T-Mobile G1 smartphone. Last week I pulled the trigger — I got the Acer Aspire One.

For me, it was an impulse purchase. I stopped into my local Micro Center (aka Valhalla) ostensibly to look at the Lenovo S10. I swear I was just gonna look. Then I saw the Aspire for $279 and thought, “What the heck. If it croaks after 6 months I’m not out that much money.” My wife was like, “$279 is nothing if it makes you shut up about netbooks.” So, boom, the deal was done.

Pros:

• It’s soooooo light — under 2.5 pounds — less than half the weight of my office laptop. And the power brick is light, too.

• It’s got 1GB of RAM and a 160 GB drive — plenty of capacity for what I want it to do.

• No probs connecting wifi at home, Jenkins, or at Drexel.

• Ditto for powering 2 different LCD projectors. (If it wasn’t able to do that, it would have been a deal-buster. I’d have had to return it to Micro Center and take a 15% hit on the restocking fee. Whew!)

Cons:

• No LCD drive, so I can’t play DVDs or CDs. (I can buy a USB drive for like $65 if I want/need to, say, reinstall Windows.)

• Some reviewers say the fan’s noisy. I can hear it when it kicks in, but it’s not bad.

• The battery life is short — around 3 hours. That’s still plenty to get me through a class at Drexel or a presentation at a conference.

• My big beef? The left- and right-buttons on the mousepad sound/feel tinny and cheap. I don’t think they’ll break any time soon, but if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on them failing first.

Final note:

The Acer’s running Windows XP. I decided to go without antivirus (but did turn on the Windows firewall), ’cause I’m just sooo tired of having it slow me down. I decided to stick exclusively with Google Chrome because it’s way safer than IE and even Firefox. We’ll see how it goes.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on May 19, 2009 (boomark / email).