OT Netbooks - which one?

Samsung NC10. £309 though.

I know Medio stuff isn't quite IBM, but we've got a 2.8 P4 Medion Laptop that I got back in March '03 and it's still going strong and in daily use (gave it to my mum) today. Gets a bit slowed down by it's 4,200rpm (iirc) hard drive, but it's never broken or even had Windows chow down on itself. It was once dropped onto a rock hard hospital ward floor from over a metre up and it survived fine, didn't even crack the case - although the CD drive tray popped off it;s runners but it just clipped back on.

My sister has one of these:

It's nice; 120GB HD but if storage isn't your thing you can get it with a 16GB solid state drive which will help battery life I guess. The display is crisp and typing on it doesn't feel too cramped.

It comes with Linux Lite which will let you do all you want; you can get one with Windows on if you'd prefer though.

And I think the Median Akoyo is a rebadged MSI/Advent (and I have heard Dell mentioned too) model too.

Popular as Hackintosh platforms.

Ok I have bought tons of these over the last few months for customers and I will tell you my views.

Samsung NC10 is ok, its far too expensive but well made Advent do an ok one but it doesnt come with bluetooth Acer/asus Big following, cheap at 200 quid but the screen is small and has no bluetooth

The one I would go for is the HP I note 2133, its 200 quid with linux installed, wipe it and whack XP pro on a usb stick, lots of instructions on the net on how to do this, 1gb ram standard, bluetooth, 120gb hdd and its build quality is amazing, nice big chunky keys too if you got fat fingers :)

All the drivers for XP are on the HP website and once you wipe that s***ty linux off you are good to go :P last one i got from pcworld was 199.99 heres a lin k

ron

Acer. The Asus ones I've seen after a few months use look very ropey.

Or spend more and get the Vaio P.

but for such a nice machine

That's the one I have - but I wiped Linux and installed a spare copy of XP Pro I had kicking around.

Okay, so I am something of a Sony fanboy, but I'd baulk at £900 for the Vaio P or

That looks like the sort of thing I want, for the sort of money I want to spend.

Thanks all for the suggestions! Guess I'll be trekking around looking at some this weekend in the shops, then see where I can find them cheaper online :-)

Mike p

NC10 gets between 5.5 and 8hrs out of a charge and has virtually a fullsize keyboard..

That looks like the sort of thing I want, for the sort of money I want to spend.

Thanks all for the suggestions! Guess I'll be trekking around looking at some this weekend in the shops, then see where I can find them cheaper online :-)

Mike p

That one's a really nice colour :-) I'd have the Medion still, but only because it's got Windows on it and it's got a slightly bigger, but still small enough to be compact screen.

Burn in Hell Infidel!

Trouble is it has no bluetooth :( Unless you call a massive dongle hanging out the side bluetooth, thats the only trouble otherwise its a nice bit of kit.

Any 6 cell will give you 5.5hrs + And the NC10 has issues with wireless networking, I have installed about 20 NC10's and they are a nice bit of kit, but they cost over 300 quid and i don't think the price justifies the product.

You get everything the NC10 has on the 2133 apart from the 6 cell battery and the bigger screen, if youcan stretch to £330 then the NC10 is a no brainer, but for sub £200 money you won't get better than the 2133, especially as the 2133 runs Linux,XP or Vista very well.

Just leave Linux on, Windows is gay.

linux is gayer, it doesn't even work out of the box on lots of netbooks, some stupid grub 19 error

It's only a netbook, life is far too short for either hacking OSX to run on one, or getting Linux to work properly.