[Gllug] Netbook recommendations?

[John Winters]

Joel Bernstein wrote (of the Acer Aspire One):
[snip]
> I played with the horrific default "LinPus Lite" Linux distro for a  
> few hours, then put it away until I had a use case for it. The screen  
> is tiny, the keyboard is awful for typing on, it has mini keycaps with  
> very little travel, and the trackpad is absolutely a joke, to the  
> extent that it has the buttons vertically at either side, and 1/3 of  
> the tiny pad area is a scroll area. This adds up to something that's  
> not very easy at all to operate. It's not all bad but it's difficult  
> to play Solitaire on let alone to hack code or watch a movie.

It makes an amazing difference if you buy one of those tiny Bluetooth
USB adapters and leave it permanently plugged in, then use a Bluetooth
mouse.  The trackpad is by far the most difficult part - it's suitable
for brief emergency use but not much more.  With a proper mouse the
whole thing is much more usable.

The default SSD is also terribly slow; they clearly went for a very
cheap one.  It helps if you have a lot of RAM (mine has 1.5G) and the
unit gets steadily faster the longer you have it on for (because
everything you want is already cached in RAM).

As a cheap, small, take-it-anywhere-and-don't-worry-about-it unit it's
extremely useful.

John

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