OT Computer question

[Rusty]

I've just been back online a few days now, I got knocked off by a lightening strike. It came in the phone line and killed the modem, the wireless router and my desktop computer. I'm thinking of either getting a laptop or a notebook sized as a replacement. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the notebooks. The ones I've been looking at have as much HD space as my old desktop. The only drawback I see is the lack of a built in disk drive which I don't use much anyway.


Any input? Thanks,

[Alan Wood]

When you say notebook do you mean netbook? By lack of disk drive I assume you mean dvd/cdrom drive. If the machine lacks one of those you should be able to plug an external one in by usb. The one thing to know about any of these is that the hard drives are slower than desktop machines. Oh and if you want the battery to last do not leave the thing plugged in all the time. Unplug it and run the battery down at least once a week then recharge it. Makes a huge difference in battery life.

Outside of hard disk speed you can pretty much get as fast a machine as you want these days in a laptop.

[Borregos]

I have a netbook, they are great but have some drawbacks, for instance I can't load my Canon picture program due to the screen resolution but all in all it does everything I want it to
If you need anymore information pm me.

[Rusty]

Oh never thought ab out the digital photography problem. that would be a bug.

[Grizz]

costco is selling the 11.1" acer netbook that I'm recommending to my daughter. has a 160 gb hard drive and windows xp home edition which will run photo software. you'd also want an external usb optical drive and hard drive.

I have the 10" linux ssd version of that computer and it's a great travel companion. I have a 500 gb passport usb drive that I keep all my files on. I really like the thing, but don't use it at home.

We have another acer that has an optical drive and hard drive built in and we have xp pro on that one. It's a good machine for a step up, it has a full adobe suite on it, but it's a pain to travel with it, say to use it in the front seat of your truck, whereas the netbooks are easy and convenient to use.

More to the point, it would pay to use a UPS (battery power supply) for your computers. A good one will save your computer from a repeat, and the good ones guarantee it.

Regards,

Grizz

[Kansas Ed]

My wife and our son both have HP notebooks, and they are top in my opinion. I have a Compaq desktop, and our daughter has a Gateway desktop. We have an Acer desktop connected to our TV permanently. Our son started out with a Gateway laptop but honestly the quality wasn't there, so after it continued to have issues, I stripped it of its components and he bought a HP instead. I used to be a big Gateway fan, but his first laptop changed my mind.

As Alan said, look at external additions. I'm a firm believer in External components. I picked up an external floppy drive which I use for some things (taxes, college schoolwork, etc where I need cheap small files to store). An external DVD drive is really nice for mobility to older desktops which don't have DVD capability. External HD's are fantastic, and with the right equipment can be set up as a network drive for your wireless system.

One thing to look at with your laptop, is an HDMI port. It allows you to easily hook your laptop up to a flatscreen HDMI equipped TV. Technology is headed that way anyway, so it's best to go there now. I actually picked up a very cheap 21" LCD TV for our daughter last christmas, and made sure it had a computer interface on it. The TV doubles as her computer screen, so she has one screen for TV, DVD, VHS, Computer, and Nintendo. At 7 years old she's pretty high tech

BTW, our first computer suffered the exact same problem as yours did...lightning through the phone line. Fried the HD. I rebuilt it and it's sitting in the closet, but with only an 8gig HD, I'm not sure what it's good for anymore. Still works great with Win 98 though, but the video card is so outdated it doesn't do movie stuff very well. Make sure you save any parts off of your old computer that you think may be good. DVD drive, HD, Powersupply, RAM, video card, USB card, floppy drive. You never know when you might need extra parts. I used to be scared of tearing into them, but it's mostly just a R&R system, as long as you are grounded to the case to prevent static electricity from frying components.

Ed

[AmBraCol]

Rusty, it all depends on what you want to do and how you're set up and how much you actually compute. The lack of a built in CD ROM/DVD drive is a slight problem if you want to add software that wasn't included with the machine. You can buy an external DVD drive - but then you're pushing the cost of a full sized laptop. The netbooks are small and compact and handy if you want something to tote along - I'd seriously hesitate at trying to make one into my main machine though. They're too large for a cell phone and too small for a serious computer. Some folks really, really like them though.

Don't base your decision on what "my old machine" was like. Technology moves along and if your old computer was two or three (or more) years old then it's seriously dated as to hardware etc. It pays to invest as much as you can NOW - not thinking "I'll upgrade it as I go". Get as good of a machine set up as nicely as you can afford NOW - and it should give you good service for years to come. I bought a very nice laptop in '06. And the only thing I've done to it is update the hard drive to 500 gigs over the 120 gigs it had back then. My camera shoots 8 megapixels and really eats the hard drive space, but since I got a good machine back then it was a simple matter of swapping the hard drive - the rest is set up better still than many base machines are today.

If you're stuck on the netbook concept, take into consideration the keyboard layout. If you do much typing it's going to be cramped unless you're small and narrow shouldered. I don't even use my laptop keyboard unless I'm traveling. A fullsized ergonomic wireless keyboard with a decent wireless mouse do the honors of communicating my commands to the machine. The same could be done with a netbook for desk top use. Dell's netbook gets rave reviews from a friend of mine who's a dedicated 'puter geek. He runs Ubuntu Linux on his and is tickled pink.

Will you use it for on the go computing? If not, you can get FAR MORE desktop for the same money than you'll get in a laptop. We upgraded my wife's machine this year. We got her a HP with 500 gigs hard drive, 4 gigs or RAM and a 20" LCD monitor for about what a lap top with a 250 gig hard drive, two gigs of RAM and a 14" screen would have cost us. It's not portable, but she doesn't need to move it around. AND we still have her old laptop (which will soon be getting a Linux install) to use if she DOES need a portable.

A good UPS goes a long way to improving a desktop machine. Especially down here where we have the lights go out more than you do in the US. What we DON'T have currently is a good groundwire. We hope to purchase our own place soon and it WILL be so wired - even if I have to do it myself. Older houses such as we live in simply don't have groundwires unless they've been upgraded along the way. The codes didn't demand such until very recently. But I digress.

The main drawbacks to the little netbooks are the limited screen space, no CD/DVD drive (especially desirable if you want to burn a CD or DVD with your digital pics) and tiny keyboard. If you can live with that and just want a dedicated surfing/chatting/occasional e-mail machine - the netbook is hard to beat 'cause of the price.

BUT, for a theoretical $399.00 you can get more laptop than you can netbook and more desktop than you can either of the others. Go to Best Buy ( http://www.bestbuy.com ) or another retailer with a large selection of various brands and compare what a set amount of money will buy. You'd be surprised and what you can get in one type of machine as compared to another. Make sure you compare desktops with an included monitor to keep prices/specifications fair.

Me? I'll probably be shopping for another laptop when the time comes. But I sometimes travel and also use the laptop for teaching and such. Sometimes I play with the idea of setting up another desktop. Maybe someday I will. But I can't afford two machines right now so will play around with my wife's nearly moribund old laptop and PRETEND it's a killer desktop machine with Linux installed. Once I get the time to install Linux that is...

[Old Savage]

I have had a notebook my whole time here and don't know why you would get anything else.

[AmBraCol]

I have had a notebook my whole time here and don't know why you would get anything else.

What we used to call a "notebook" is now called a "laptop" and there's a new machine in the mix called a "netbook". Some of them are priced at around $250 or so and so are very attractive to the price conscious. BUT they reach that price at the cost of features. They are stripped down to the bare essentials and then those are stripped down even further. At least that's my impression. A portable computer has its pros and cons. It's usually quite adequate for basic computing and some of them can slug it out with some seriously well configured desktop machines - albeit at a higher cost per unit (RAM, hard drive, monitor, etc) than the same power in a desktop configuration. Portability costs more. For me one of the new netbooks would be nothing more than an expensive toy. Not powerful enough to do some of the work I do but still handy enough to goof around with.

[Modoc ED]

You need not be stuck with a 5600 RPM hard drive on a notebook. There are plenty of 7200RPM hard drives available for them. As to screen resolution, the sky is the limit. The screen resolution on my DELL notebook is 1280 x 1024. There are no photo programs I can't run on it.

[AmBraCol]

You need not be stuck with a 5600 RPM hard drive on a notebook. There are plenty of 7200RPM hard drives available for them. As to screen resolution, the sky is the limit. The screen resolution on my DELL notebook is 1280 x 1024. There are no photo programs I can't run on it.

The key to the original post is here:

The only drawback I see is the lack of a built in disk drive which I don't use much anyway.

He's referring to the current crop of "nEtbooks". These are small (10 inch screen) computers usually with only a gig of RAM, no DVD or CDROM and a relatively tiny hard drive. Some of them come with the solidstate hard drives which essentially are king sized "thumb drives". No moving parts, should be very shock resistant. I can see the wisdom of starting a kid out on something like this. Fewer moving parts. Fewer problems. They will not make a good substitute for a fully equipped laptop (notebook) or desktop however. Unless you're a very light user and mainly only do e-mail stuff, etc. And also if you have good enough eyesight to see the tiny screen. And if you've hands and shoulders that allow you to actually use the keyboard in a non-damaging way. A lot of ifs in there. BUT they are the "latest and greatest" and sell mainly on their price. My point is that for not much more money you can get so much more computer. And Windoze Seven is coming out in just a while. It's supposed to be lightyears ahead of Vista's sorry excuse for an OS.

[Modoc ED]

You need not be stuck with a 5600 RPM hard drive on a notebook. There are plenty of 7200RPM hard drives available for them. As to screen resolution, the sky is the limit. The screen resolution on my DELL notebook is 1280 x 1024. There are no photo programs I can't run on it.

The key to the original post is here:

The only drawback I see is the lack of a built in disk drive which I don't use much anyway.

He's referring to the current crop of "nEtbooks". These are small (10 inch screen) computers usually with only a gig of RAM, no DVD or CDROM and a relatively tiny hard drive. Some of them come with the solidstate hard drives which essentially are king sized "thumb drives". No moving parts, should be very shock resistant. I can see the wisdom of starting a kid out on something like this. Fewer moving parts. Fewer problems. They will not make a good substitute for a fully equipped laptop (notebook) or desktop however. Unless you're a very light user and mainly only do e-mail stuff, etc. And also if you have good enough eyesight to see the tiny screen. And if you've hands and shoulders that allow you to actually use the keyboard in a non-damaging way. A lot of ifs in there. BUT they are the "latest and greatest" and sell mainly on their price. My point is that for not much more money you can get so much more computer. And Windoze Seven is coming out in just a while. It's supposed to be lightyears ahead of Vista's sorry excuse for an OS.

Ok, I gotcha. Ya know, I have internet access on my cell phone but the letters are so small that I can't read em. Technology is great but just because something is possible doesn't necessarily mean it's for me. And when it comes to texting, my thumbs are so full of arthritis that it's a no-no for me.

[Travis Morgan]

AT&T and Verizon both offer wireless netbooks that use cellular service. They're about $300 with a 2 year contract, but I think they'd be handy. Disk drives are peripheral.