Great deal on a netbook

[Jesda]

http://www.techspot.com/guides/264-chan ... 7-starter/

[Kompresshun]

http://www.techspot.com/guides/264-chan ... 7-starter/

Good to know you can make it work, but regardless it's still pretty ghey that you can't at least change your wallpaper with the starter.

I'm going to put Ubuntu on it and see if I can sell my wife on using it because I think she'll get frustrated with the lack of features after a while too, but maybe I can upgrade it eventually for her.

[Jesda]

http://www.techspot.com/guides/264-chan ... 7-starter/

Good to know you can make it work, but regardless it's still pretty ghey that you can't at least change your wallpaper with the starter.

I'm going to put Ubuntu on it and see if I can sell my wife on using it because I think she'll get frustrated with the lack of features after a while too, but maybe I can upgrade it eventually for her.

Mad gay. And when W7 Starter first came out, they limited it to running only three programs at a time.

[Kompresshun]

Mad gay. And when W7 Starter first came out, they limited it to running only three programs at a time.

That would just piss me off. On a typical workday i'm running at least 6-7 programs and have 6-8 tabs open in Firefox and that's on a somewhat slow day... If I were limited to 3 programs I would personally kick everyone involved in creating Win 7 Starter in the nads for even having the idea of such an utterly ridiculous and neutered version of an OS

[Jesda]

Lenovo is sending out a box to ship my S10 in for repair. Sucks. I love using this thing. The design is so geometric and clean.

[Kompresshun]

Lenovo is sending out a box to ship my S10 in for repair. Sucks. I love using this thing. The design is so geometric and clean.

Wow, that is a nice looking netbook. How much do those run?

[Jesda]

I paid $199 at Microcenter, refurbished. Last year I picked up two new ones for my parents at Radio Shack for $299 each. Theirs have been excellent PCs, shared by the doctors at the office for notes and dictation. Mine probably went through the refurb process with leftover defects. The exterior build quality is pretty impressive. There's no keyboard flex and the keys have a quiet and precise click. The touchpad buttons are on the bottom where they ought to be. I heard the S10-2 was cheapened compared to the S10 and S10e.


Until I get it back, I'm borrowing this Toshiba Libretto from a friend:



The screen is TINY, I think 7" across. And you can see how hard it can be to type with my fat sausage fingers. Battery life is good for a few hours, impressive considering that its four years old. The Pentium M is comparable to the Atom in terms of performance, but it can get pretty hot.

It would be neat if netbooks integrated optical drives with a docking base like this, but USB is equally effective and a lot cheaper.

[BusyBadger]

MoD, you know you want it - even without it having an internal optical drive.

Alienware M11x

[Jesda]

A gaming laptop without a DVD drive is kind of weird.

[MinisterofDOOM]

I'd love an M11x. But the lack of optical drive isn't as much of a problem for it, since most of my newer games are Steam or Impulse purchases, meaning they're disc-free. There are still quite a few that I couldn't play, but my 70-game Steam library means I probably wouldn't miss them much. That's not the case with netbooks, which can't play most of my Steam games (though Torchlight does have a shader-free [GMA950-friendly] mode specifically designed with netbooks in mind).

I'd much rather have a REAL gaming laptop, though. Like the M17x.

[Razi]

Until I get it back, I'm borrowing this Toshiba Libretto from a friend:

That thing is awesome looking.

[Jesda]

Why do all these Alienware notebooks look like they were designed for virgins and LOTR fans? Its decent hardware underneath, so whats up with that?

[MinisterofDOOM]

I don't know. I know a lot of gamers, and none of them have ever reacted positively to the angular, colorful weirdness of Alienware laptops. I want something that doesn't scream "STEAL ME PLEASE" if I'm going to be carrying it with me everywhere.

[Jesda]

Until I get it back, I'm borrowing this Toshiba Libretto from a friend:

That thing is awesome looking.

Its mostly because of my high-end photography.

[Jesda]

This is a photo from dell.com of the Latitude 2100. What the hell is this kid doing? I see rulers, stars, cocks, and triangles. Looks like a special ed class.

[MinisterofDOOM]

GUI needs more brown.

[Alfador]

http://www.techspot.com/guides/264-chan ... 7-starter/

Good to know you can make it work, but regardless it's still pretty ghey that you can't at least change your wallpaper with the starter.

I'm going to put Ubuntu on it and see if I can sell my wife on using it because I think she'll get frustrated with the lack of features after a while too, but maybe I can upgrade it eventually for her.

Isn't W7 starter for like, 3rd world and developing countries?

[Jesda]

That was the intent, then Microsoft got annoyed by the widespread use of Windows XP on low-end hardware. In other words, MS wanted us all to join the bandwagon, so W7 Starter was offered as a low-cost alternative.

As personal computer purchases are becoming motivated by casual users and less by gamers and the rest of us tech folk, hardware demands have become more widespread. The industry longs for a time where spending $3000 on the latest and greatest was barely enough to run Delrina Winfax and log on to Prodigy.

[Kompresshun]

I paid $199 at Microcenter, refurbished. Last year I picked up two new ones for my parents at Radio Shack for $299 each. Theirs have been excellent PCs, shared by the doctors at the office for notes and dictation. Mine probably went through the refurb process with leftover defects. The exterior build quality is pretty impressive. There's no keyboard flex and the keys have a quiet and precise click. The touchpad buttons are on the bottom where they ought to be. I heard the S10-2 was cheapened compared to the S10 and S10e.

Thanks for the info, I think i'll be taking a look at that one now as well, if they still have them out there.

Isn't W7 starter for like, 3rd world and developing countries?

I don't know if i'd wish that upon them even...

[Kompresshun]

That was the intent, then Microsoft got annoyed by the widespread use of Windows XP on low-end hardware. In other words, MS wanted us all to join the bandwagon, so W7 Starter was offered as a low-cost alternative.

As personal computer purchases are becoming motivated by casual users and less by gamers and the rest of us tech folk, hardware demands have become more widespread. The industry longs for a time where spending $3000 on the latest and greatest was barely enough to run Delrina Winfax and log on to Prodigy.

We still have XP on 3 machines here in the office, personally I prefer 7 for my day to day use but XP is still a good OS and I would much rather have an outdated OS like XP vs the gayness of the 7 Starter. Hopefully they'll wise up and at least add some more basic features to it, at least make it usable instead of neutering it down to nothing.

Wow, I remember Prodigy back in the day. Man i'm starting to feel old, I can remember Prodigy, AOL 1.0, Netscape Navigator, and having an Apple IIe as my first computer.

[Jesda]

I spent my morning so far reading about Packard Bell, Gateway, AST, Midwest Micro, CTX, and a whole bunch of other current/defunct PC manufacturers.

"AST Advantage" makes me think of Growing Pains.

[Jesda]

Good job, Lenovo, on sending a box way too big.

[Jesda]

Their email looks like Nigerian spam:

[Kompresshun]

I haven't had good luck with Lenovo customer service, I ordered a Lenovo laptop before I bought my Toshiba. They told me it would be 5-6 weeks before I would get it and it wasn't a custom laptop either... so I called them and told them to cancel the order because I needed something sooner. I had to spend an hour on the phone with them trying to explain to me why I shouldn't cancel my order and could barely understand any of the 3 customer service reps I spoke with. To make things better, it took them 2 weeks and 3 more calls to give me a refund

I think Lenovo has good products but I hate ordering directly from the manufacturer in any case.

[Jesda]

A friend of mine bought an X-series ultraportable tablet for about $2500 a few years ago. It was delayed for weeks and when it finally arrived the video was pooched -- the thing was barely able to run Simcity 4. He sent it back a couple times until it was finally corrected. Kind of crappy. Lenovo was quick to answered when I called, however. I got a guy in Georgia.

[Kompresshun]

Yeah i've had the same problems out of Dell, I don't plan on buying from the manufacturer anymore. I bought my Toshiba directly from Best Buy, got just as good of a deal on it as I would have buying it online, and walked out with it the same day. Now I will shop around online still but buying direct from Dell and Lenovo has been a huge hassle every time. Of course I don't have a contact either... I didn't think they had hardly anybody here in the states for customer service.

On another note, I was really shocked that Woot already shipped out the netbook today via FedEx. The last two things i've ordered from them have taken 2 weeks or so to get here.

[Otto.]

"It's dead, Jim."

LOL

[Kompresshun]

Well it got here today, so far it's really nice. I'm going through and getting all of the crap off of it and getting it all setup but overall it seems like a good buy so far. It's really quick for a netbook and the screen is excellent on it. Overall I think it'll serve my wife well, she already loves it.

[RCA]

Is there a lot of factory programs on there?
From the looks of it, WIN7 starter looks pretty clean though.

[Kompresshun]

Is there a lot of factory programs on their?
From the looks of it, WIN7 starter looks pretty clean though.

Not too much, it had Mcafee antivirus, Norton system backup, and some Acer stuff. I removed all of the Antivirus and Norton stuff, installed Microsoft Security Essentials(great for Antivirus, Malware, and Spyware, my wifes uncle that's a software programmer told me about it and it's free), Installed Firefox and the Oceanis program(so you can change the wallpaper).

So far it runs great, Win7 Starter is very clean, with the wallpaper issue fixed it's not bad, my wife has been using it most of the morning so far and hasn't complained about anything yet. It may be stripped down but it's not too bad, I played with it for a couple of hours and it seems fine. I think I may still want to upgrade it eventually though.