Underpowered

[moui]

These are the ones I am thinking about: any thoughts?

I would like 6+ hours of battery life if possible. I am interested to some extent in bluetooth as well as 802.11n although I currently do not have any infrastructure for 11n nor any bluetooth devices. I do think I would at some point make use of one or the other (or both) if it was available.

MSI Wind U100
$290 - $300
3-cell battery
802.11b/g WLAN
No bluetooth

MSI Wind U123
$345 - $375
9-cell battery
802.11b/g/n WLAN
bluetooth

ASUS Eee PC 1005HA
$330
6-cell battery (claims 8.5 hrs of life)
802.11b/g/n WLAN
bluetooth
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"My folks were always on me to groom myself and wear underpants. What am I, the pope?" -Fry

"Tally and Tyler have entered a world where Greeks and Hipsters will fight each other with Windex and guitars for control over Astoria." -Matt

[bluexy]

I like the Asus Eee PCs a lot more than others (lenovo, msi, Acer). They really do get a few more battery hours than the others. Most netbooks have the same stuff inside of them though, so if you find an aesthetic you like then you should go for it. (make sure it's blue!)

To get anything better you'd need to jump into the $500 range and then you're just looking at cheap laptops.

[manekineko]

I really really love my ASUS EeePC 1005 HA. (I got the one claiming 10.5 hours battery life.) It lasts around 7-8.5 hours on a charge and runs XP beautifully. I have a very fast connection. Additionally, the comps come with an insta-tweak thing where you hold the function key and tap spacebar and it goes between super performance, high performance, and energy mode. I've found this to be quite helpful depending on my situation.

I do recommend getting a 2gb stick. They're super cheap, the ship quickly from amazon, and there's a very convenient door on the bottom of the EeePC that you unscrew that has the memory area lined up for easy upgrading. Just pop out the original stick, put yours in, screw it back up, and you're golden! (Don't forget to start your comp up and get xp all situated before changing any of the hardware, though.)

I will say that even though a lot of them are built similarly, you should check them out first--go to some stores to feel the keyboard and mousepads. Some netbooks bothered me. The HP one is cute but it has mouse buttons on either side of the mousepad. Some have a poor touchpad response and some have awkward keyboard configs. (Asus' 93% keyboard is sexy and logical and I love the touchpad but the mouse buttons, while in the proper place, are probably the weakest aspect of the controls--sometimes you misclick because its a little flimsy. Pretty minor though.)

[Chien]

I am helping a friend shop for one now, so I will start to ramble...

3 cell batteries normally run about 2.5 to 3.5 hours. I'd suggest anything with 1 gig ram minimum (or the ability to upgrade) and a solid state drive if you'll be lugging it everywhere. People forget that regular HDDs don't like going bump in the night. Bluetooth is nice if you need to rope it to a phone with a data plan for internet usage (if you can't get a wireless signal). From what I hear, some of the new netbooks should ship with Win 7, but you'd need more ram and a bigger hard drive to run it. Most netbooks with XP have home on them (shiver).

[bluexy]

[nokturnal]

We want to buy a netbook before our trip to Hawaii, since they offer free wifi in the rooms. From reading this thread, it seems like the Asus are pretty good. We went to Best Buy the other day just to look around and I noticed that they all come with Win 7 but only 1 gig of RAM. Is that enough?
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[moui]

you could watch woot.com -- I got mine there for $200 (it was refurb, but in near-perfect condition) and it came with XP. It's the Acer (not the Asus) but I have had zero complaints. Great battery life, and fast enough for what I want.

I don't have experience with Win 7 so I can't answer that question.

This one on Newegg has 802.11n capability and comes with XP for $290:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220736

you could also look at the ones that come with some form of linux. since you can't really do anything fancy with it, I don't think you'd have a problem using ubuntu or gentu or whatevs.
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"My folks were always on me to groom myself and wear underpants. What am I, the pope?" -Fry

"Tally and Tyler have entered a world where Greeks and Hipsters will fight each other with Windex and guitars for control over Astoria." -Matt

[bluexy]

win7 typically takes up between 600-800mb of RAM at all times.

[Gryson]

Without Aero 1 gig is plenty. I have had it running on several systems with <1G which automatically turns Aero off and it runs better than XP.
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[nokturnal]

[Gryson]

Aero is the pretty glassy affects that you get in Windows 7. It makes the interface all shiny and pretty. Its really unnecessary to run the computer, but it looks nice.
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