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A couple weeks ago, I went to visit my in-laws for the weekend. While we were up there, I was troubleshooting the desktop I’d built for my then-fiance 3 years ago. The power supply was on the fritz, and I figured I’d spend Sunday morning out at Staples or Best Buy or some other brick & mortar getting them a new PSU. That morning, the computer blue screened with a Invalid Boot Disk. The situation had escalated from a new PSU to a new PSU + new harddrive + me reformatting the thing.
Hell with that, I thought, and suggested that it was time for them to get a new laptop. In the end, my mother in law took my T61, and we all know what that means: A new laptop for me!
I’d been toying with the idea of a netbook again for a while. I loved my 701, other than the keyboard and screen. I guess I should say I loved the concept, more than the actual product. I had put a touch screen in it, bought a 16gb SDHC, 2gb stick of RAM, and it worked perfectly, so long as I didn’t mind scrolling all the time.
I tired of it, and bought and sold a series of laptops (about a half dozen or so) for about 5 months(looking for the perfect one) until I managed to snag the T61 on eBay for $600. With almost 3 full years of warranty remaining(which is also the reason my mother in law has my T61 instead of some new laptop from Newegg or a brick & mortar), it was a steal.
But, it was hard to justify a third laptop to do the things my T61 could do. I lost portability, but I had more power than I needed, and more flexibility (namely the ability to change harddrives to run XP or Linux or whatever else instead of of Vista, without dual booting).
But, without this system, it was time for me to weigh my options. Take the $500 I’m getting for doing some tech work and get a netbook, and keep the money my m-i-l gives me, or combine the two and get a multimedia-focused laptop. After taking a look at the first choice for a multimedia laptop in my budget (a 9800 equipped Asus G50), I decided that it wasn’t worth the extra money, and that I should focus on a netbook instead.
I looked at an Averatec-labeled MSI Wind, and an EEE1000HD. I knew I wouldn’t buy either one from their respective stores, but I could get a feel for them, especially their keyboard. I’d been hearing about the Samsung NC10, but it was never available in the USA when I looked for it. Things had changes between the time I was toying with the idea and when I was forced into action, namely, the NC10 had shown up on Newegg.
I would have preferred to use eBay for the Live Cashback, but I couldn’t find a place that would be both eligible for cash back and could guarantee that I’d have it by Monday the 24th (as I’m leaving for Thanksgiving tonight, the 25th).
The following, I’ll just repeat the review I made on Newegg.
Pros:
EXCELLENT keyboard. All the keys are easy to press, I don’t find myself contorting to hit Shift or any other key.Battery life is insane on it. I cleaned up the harddrive, did some windows updates, and defragged and it still had over 6 hours of battery life left. It pegged at over 7 when I turned off the WiFi.
Doesn’t feel that much heavier than my old 701, but is an improvement upon it in every way other than the SD reader.
Screen is very bright and easily readable in the car when being used as a GPS.
Feels very solidly built.
Cons:
SDHC slot doesn’t allow for an SD card to fit flush with the side as with the EEE, or my T61p.Speakers are rather weak, but this was expected.
Those are the only major complaints.
As far as minor issues:
I’m used to Thinkpads, I would have preferred to see the FN key on the outside, but most people seem to prefer FN on the inside of the CTRL key.Battery status LED is supposed to be green, the blue LEDs on either side of it drown it out so it looks like an off-white LED. I wish they would have stuck with just Blue LEDs across.
I wish the laptop had the harddrive easily accessible, as I prefer to run different operating systems on separate drives. I thought I’d try to mitigate the HDD issue by installing on an SDHC card, but it doesn’t appear to want to boot off of SDHC.
Other Thoughts:
I wiped this out of the box for a VLited Vista Home Premium (with a 2gb stick), so I can’t speak of the original software package it came with.
Partitions appeared to be 7gb hidden, 20gb, 120gb. DBAN took care of the hidden partition Vista failed to see on bootup.
Drivers for Vista aren’t too hard to find, and other models that are Vista compatible will have all the manufacturer software you need.
The black model would certainly have complimented my Thinkpad a bit better, but it would seem that the black and blue models have a glossy exterior; I’d rather have a matte finish to glossy any day of the week.
I bought this to compliment my more powerful Thinkpad. While it has tons of muscle, I wanted a system with more battery life. This will serve a nice counterpart for my mobile needs.
Now for the pictures
Superb………thanks for that. Really helpful.
I am about to get the white so was good to see pics as well, I also have an IBM thinkpad but am missing a monitor quite as big as that!
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