I need a netbook.

J

Jospeh

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 29, 2008
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Okay I need something small and cheap. I plan to buy a used one so I guess around 400-500$ max new? I'm hoping to get it used for around 300$. Note that small is bolded. I need it as small as possible without the price being raped horribly. I'm guessing 9" or so? Possibly a small SSD on it would be good.

I plan to use it for the following:
Listening to music.
Studying off Anki.
Using it as a dictionary.

Needs at least 2 usb ports. 3 would be ideal.

PS is there anyway to make the thing not go to sleep when I shut the screen so I can use it as an music player?
 
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The ASUS 1001P would do everything that you requested, and costs $300. For $330 you can get the ASUS 1005PE which has a better keyboard, bigger hdd and wireless N. I got it mainly for the better keyboard.

To make it so the computer doen't go to sleep when you shut the screen, you just change options in the windows battery management center.

1001p

1005pe


Anandtech.com review of the 1001p and why it's awesome.

After using a netbook abit I liken it to using a really old desktop. I feel that it runs about as slow as my old Pentium 4 box at work. Open up to many things at once and it bogs down. You also have to wait a little bit at startup for things to setlte down.
 
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Hum. Anything with an SSD in it instead of a regular HDD? I figure about 32GBs will be enough. 16 Maybe depending on how much the OS will take up. I have a question. Would going 9" be worthwhile? Or is there a lot to sacrifice by losing that 1"?
 
I'm not aware of any newer netbooks that come with ssds. From my understanding those netbooks all sucked due to the fact that they were using extremely low quality SSDs.

In regards to a 9" Netbook, It would reduce the size of the keyboard would be my main concern. I find a 10" netbook has a cramped keyboard at 90% size, I couldn't imagine it being any smaller.

I also don't know of any new pinetrail atom powered netbooks that come below 10". I would highly reccomend the new netbooks that come with the n450 atom cpu because they get amazing battery life. The 1001p was tested by anandtech.com to get 7.5hrs of runtime during as they put it heavy flash based web browsing.

If you really want a SSD I'd reccomend getting a netbook, playing with it for a while and seeing if the 5400rpm drive they come with is fast enough and or durable enough for your usage. If you find it isn't just buy a 40GB or so drive off newegg if that is all you want. However if you do this you will need a windows 7 license because from my understanding SSDs suck without trim.

I reccomend that you go to a local store like bestbuy and try out some of there netbooks, the one near me only had a couple and they were all 10" ones, so this doesn't help with your questoin about a 9" one. But you can see if the netbooks are fast enough for what you want to do, and see how the keyboard feels, because I think once you see how cramped a 10" keyboard is you'll be afraid to go smaller.
 
I see thanks. I'll probably buy sometime in the next few days. So if anyone has something to add feel free.
 
Find a local Worst Buy, or similar and try out the 8.9" screens as well as the 10" netbook keyboards, it really does make a difference.
 
Another vote for the 1005PE...I love mine.

Windows 7 home OEM is zippy, 250 GB HDD is nice...plays music/vids just fine and it's a great web-surfer, too.

Not to mention, damn near 12 hours of battery life in power-saving mode.
 
The 1001p is a great choice for your needs. Pair it with an Intel V series SSD, and you've got one nice little machine for around $450 USD. Outstanding battery life, GREAT display (NOT glossy thank the lord), and a very good disk system to go with it.
 
^ man i was just thinkin' I messed up on buying the 1001P (bought it today) but reading your comment got a lil more happier :) I'm kinda picky and I wanted that a Asus with same keyboard layout as the 1005PE. But I just wanted a laptop to web browse and music here and there and on the go so I wanted to spend as least as possible. I just blindly went out to frys at first today but I didn't like the Asus they had there so I went to Micro Center. They barely put up display the 1001P and another asus that i just come to realize right now was probably the 1005PE lol, but the price was 379.99 I believe. WTHELL! I just went on microcenter's website after typing the last sentence and the 1001P is priced at 279.99 !! I wonder if they price match. damn it, they just closed about an hour ago. well as I said the 1005PE at microcenter is priced at 379.99 which was why I didn't go for it also didn't know it was a 1005PE.

Well at first my 1001P was giving me problems. It loaded very slow and after I had firefox open with about 6-7 tabs and winamp playing music for about 30 mins i'd say? before this loud annoying sound screamed out so I held to the power button and right before it shut down, BSOD happened. Then for a bit it was very slow and lagging for me. then I updated BIOS and now its running like a champ. going to upgrade to 2gb as soon as I find a deal [H]ere.
 
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Does the Win 7 starting come with the ability to use Remote Desktop. Specifically as a client, so I can RDP into my server?
 
The Asus 1005PE. Best Buy has a version with a matte finish instead of shiny. Crazy good battery layout and a better keyboard layout than the 1001P.
 
J-Will said:
Does the Win 7 starting come with the ability to use Remote Desktop. Specifically as a client, so I can RDP into my server?
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All versions of Windows 7 have the RDP client. (simple google search)
 
kumquat said:
The Asus 1005PE. Best Buy has a version with a matte finish instead of shiny. Crazy good battery layout and a better keyboard layout than the 1001P.
Click to expand...

This is actually the 1005PEB unless we are thinking of different things. This is the retail version of the 1005PE it has slight differences which I perfer over the regular 1005PE. Mine is coming in the mail and should be here in the next couple days I'll give my impressions of it then.
 
volt01 said:
This is actually the 1005PEB unless we are thinking of different things. This is the retail version of the 1005PE it has slight differences which I perfer over the regular 1005PE. Mine is coming in the mail and should be here in the next couple days I'll give my impressions of it then.
Click to expand...

As far as I could tell, the PE and PEB are identical except for the finish. What else have you noticed?
 
You could consider the Acer Aspire One 532h for $300.

But, personally, I think that the flat keyboard is really horrible. It's hard to feel the keys (since they're flat) when you're touch typing. The curvature most keys usually have is there for a reason.

As a general rule, there aren't any new 9" netbooks being made anymore. Also, there aren't any new cheap netbooks with SSDs either.

You could get a refurb. 9" Acer Aspire One A110 or something like that for under $200, but it has a 8 GB + 8 GB SD Card (you could get your own up to 32 GB, but they're kinda expensive)... Not very good for a music player. It's also not that much smaller/lighter (around 1000 grams) than a 10" and the battery life is 2-3 hrs with stock 3-cell. So I think a new, Atom N450-based, 10" netbook for around $300 is a better choice for your needs.
 
shurcooL said:
You could consider the Acer Aspire One 532h for $300.

But, personally, I think that the flat keyboard is really horrible. It's hard to feel the keys (since they're flat) when you're touch typing. The curvature most keys usually have is there for a reason.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that keyboard is awful. The entire keyboard feels like a flat board. It's almost impossible to tell whether your finger is in the middle of the key or on the edge, and it's stupid easy to press two at once. Regular keys are shaped with bevels and a slight inward curve for a reason - to re-center your fingers with every keypress.
 
kumquat said:
As far as I could tell, the PE and PEB are identical except for the finish. What else have you noticed?
Click to expand...

After using the 1005peb for a couple hours, I can't notice any differences besides the matte finish on the outer screen. I personally would recommend the 1005pe / peb over the 1001p because of the keyboard alone. I feel that it is noticeably better than that on the 1001p. The computer is by no means fast after using it I'd say it's definitely slower than my pentium 4 pc at work.

However if all you want to do is listen to music, browse the net and do some word processing you should be good. Take note that while doing all this I was maxing the processor out. In fact having to many tabs open at once in chrome was stressing the pc pretty hard, to the point that wmp would skip. This wasn't a big problem just something that I haven't experienced on a pc in a long time.

Haven't got a chance to test the battery much yet. Haven't got a chance to test it with 2GB of ram yet because the screw holding the memory panel in place started to strip. I'm gonna buy a cheap #1 phillips head and super glue it to the screw and see if that works.

I can say that the pc works with 1GB of ram, however I'm constantly near max with about 4-5 chrome tabs open, a word document up, wmp playing some foreigner, some miscellaneous asus programs running in the back ground and some more uninstalling i was up to around 800-900 MB of ram being used. However I think this is the most you could be doing at once on this netbook because while doing all this the little atom processor was having a heart attack.

One final note on the keyboard, there is slight flexing when hitting keys towards the middle of the board, however I was only able to notice this by looking down at the keyboard.

Overall I am very pleased with this little guy, infact I typed this on the 1005peb, it only reduced my typing speed slightly and I only made a few more typos than normal. Overall a very usable netbook.

I feel that my biggest hindrance is the trackpad is just too small, however this is easily fixed by buying a wireless mouse.
 
kumquat said:
Yeah, that keyboard is awful. The entire keyboard feels like a flat board. It's almost impossible to tell whether your finger is in the middle of the key or on the edge, and it's stupid easy to press two at once. Regular keys are shaped with bevels and a slight inward curve for a reason - to re-center your fingers with every keypress.
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Exactly.

The reason this differs from the popular real "chiclet" keyboards is there is barely any spacing between the keys.

The real chiclet keyboards have a lot of space between the keys, so you can easily feel the key edges and it makes typing much easier.
 
I ordered the 1005PE. Do you have any recommendations for what browser to use? Is FF fine?
 
Oh yeah, Firefox works fine. You'll find yourself tweaking the layout a bit to get more screen real estate - auto-hide the task bar, disable the bookmark bar, etc.
 
You won't be disappointed with the 1005PE. I have a 1005HA-P (N280) running Windows 7 Ultimate with only the standard 1gb of memory and it runs fine. I do have a 2gb memory piece on the way but I am very impressed with how well Windows 7 Ultimate runs on this lowly netbook with only 1gb of memory.
 
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