So I finally did it. After a lot of hemming and hawing, I decided to buy netbook. While we were out Friday, I stopped by a few places and looked at various models, but to no avail. But ever the persistent one, I decided to try again Saturday.
Thus Ryan and I left the house yesterday morning to go on an expedition. A quick stop to Staples and WalMart left me unimpressed. Staples only had the HP mini with 512 MB of RAM and 8 GB hard drive; it was only $299, but I wanted more RAM for sure and more hard drive if possible. WalMart carried an older model of the Acer One (the 120 GB hard drive model), reviews of which were not always positive. The most fruitful stop was Radio Shack, where a helpful salesman showed me the Acer One, with 1 GB RAM and 160 hard drive, for $350. The $350 was a bit high; I was hoping for closer to $300. Not liking any of these options, we drove on.
We stopped by another WalMart and Staples, but it was all the same story there. Ryan and I had a good chat about why I wanted to spend $300 on a computer (“That’s a lot of money,” said he) and why I didn’t actually have $300 in my pocket at the time. He then asked, when I explained that I would simply use the check card, how the bank knew which money was ours. Quite the mind that kids has.
In desperation, our time running short (it was now 10 am, and we needed to be home by 11 so Summer could pack up for a cookie booth), we decided to make one more stop. Skipping Best Buy, we pulled up to Office Max. There we found it. The same Acer model we had looked at earlier at Radio Shack, but for $299. It was the final day of that sale price and, as I found out after checking out, the last one they had in stock. Rejoicing, we went home with a new toy.
So here’s the final verdict. The machine is small (8.9" screen), light (2.4 lbs), and fast. I’ve got enough hard drive to use the hibernation feature, which saves battery power when I shut the lid and starts back up in about two seconds. I’ve loaded some new programs on, and I think I’ll install Open Office to take care of my word processing and presentation needs. I may also see if I can install the software I use on my PDA for the scriptures. I used the new toy today in bishopric and welfare meetings to take notes, and it’s going well.
8 comments:
Congratulations. Open Office is great and free which is even better.
I agree. I installed it on my work laptop to test it out, and it's great. It's not as fancy looking as Office, but it does eveything I need. Any other cool (free) applications I should download?
Is it running Windows or some flavor of Linux? (If Linux, which one? If not, why not?)
Bill, it's an XP machine, mainly because that's all I ever found in the stores. I could custom build a Dell or HP with Linux, but it would have been late March before it even shipped. With 1 GB RAM and 160 GB hard drive, XP didn't seem a problem for the netbook.
Speaking of Linux, I have been trying to install a Linux OS on our old (circa 2000) Sony Vaio laptop; the XP on it is a mess and it's always struggling to boot up. However, the CD drive is kaput, and I can't find a version of Linux that will load from a USB disk AND that will work with the RAM on this machine (~256 KB). I tried Ubuntu, but it wouldn't work on that RAM. Any suggestions?
I'm hoping you meant 256 MB and not KB. If that's the case then Xubuntu (one of Ubuntu's variations) is made for running on older hardware with less ram and/or processing power. I like Xubuntu even more than regular Ubuntu anyway. I've been able to run Xubuntu on 256 MB ram just fine. If you still have major problems then I would suspect the hard drive to be faulty (hard drives do eventually go bad, especially in laptops).
Instructions for installing from USB.
Other recommended downloads:
If you're running Windows then you really need to get some anti-virus software on there. I like AVG-free. Like the name says it's free and it's one of the best.
Launchy - You'll love it. My favorite must-install-on-every-machine-I-own application.
Yeah, MB--my bad. I just found out about Launchy and will try it out. The anti-virus makes sense. Thanks for all the good stuff.
Gimp is a great photo-shop like software program and there's an app called gimpshop that makes it more photoshoppy. For basic photo org I like Picasa.
I hope you resisted telling Ryan that the bank DOESN'T know which money is ours - that's how we got in this fix in the first place. He doesn't need to know this anytime soon. Actually I wish I wasn't aware of it.
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