Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/01/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Quoth the Tina Manley : > At 12:42 PM 1/8/2009, you wrote: > >I just ordered an Aspire One "netbook" from Amazon, which I'll be > >coupling with various portable HD's and readers. > > I would love to have one of these for travel. My only concern is > that the reviews go from 5 star - everything is wonderful - to 1 > star - the thing died two weeks after I got it. I would hate to be on a > month long trip and have the netbook just die. The reviews of the > ASUS Eee PC 900HA are much better with no reports of failures. It > costs about the same, but I like the looks and features of the Acer > Aspire better. :-( I've been looking at the EEE for a while, but y'know I just couldn't get comfortable with the build quality of the thing. It feels almost disposable to me, and the keyboard is actually smaller than the AA- 1... and below my threshold for comfortable typing. The Aspire felt much better to me. And the brother geek/guru/hacker type was very happy to show me his, so it's not a complete unknown. I've seen a few reports of problems with dying acers, but they've seemed to be from the same people who complain that it'll only handle a gig and a half of RAM, it's a bitch to change the HD, it's too slow to run the latest 3D FPS games, etc. etc., so I have to figure that probably they're just running the things too hard for too long and burning them out. I haven't seen any reports of failure from people who take the "don't stress the machine any more than you have to" attitude that I live by, and my experience has been that if the system doesn't die within the first week or so, it's probably sound. I'm not planning on putting PS or any of the "heavy" imaging software on it. The primary photo things will be the Adobe DNG converter, the camera drivers, XNview, and GIMPdoze, which won't be perfect but won't cost extra or strain the machine, and will get at least enough done that I can blog decent web images and archive DNG's until I get home. Add in openoffice, firefox, TopoUSA, CoffeeCup, Filezilla, tweetdeck and pidgin, and a couple of the nice seagate 320 go drives, and I should have a pretty slick little grab-and-go package with decent battery life... Anyway I'm sitting here waiting for the nice FedEx man to knock on my door, and hoping he does so before I have to go shoot a school science workshop. If he does, I'll put it on to charge before I leave; if not, I'll pick it up at the FedEx depot this evening. In any case I'll try to post a preliminary evaluation tomorrow sometime. -- R. Clayton McKee http://www.rcmckee.com Photojournalist rcmckee@rcmckee.com P O Box 571900 voice/fax 713/783-3502 Houston, TX 77257-1900 cell phone # on request