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Netbook: Dell or Asus?

D

DrNic2032

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 5, 2007
Messages
125
I'm thinking about getting a netbook but I'm having trouble deciding which model to purchase. I need to keep the cost below $300. I've been looking mostly at two models;

Dell Mini 1018 (Atom N455 1.66GHz, 1GB DDR3 SDRAM, 160GB SATA 5400 RPM hard drive, 10.1" Widescreen Display (1024x600), Integrated 0.3M Pixel Webcam)

ASUS Eee PC 1001PXD-MU17 (Atom N455 1.66GHz, 1 GB DDR3 SDRAM, 250GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM), 10.1-Inch 1024X600 WSVGA LED Display, 0.3MP Webcam

The hardware specs (and price) seem about the same, although the ASUS has a larger hard drive. I've heard better things about the Asus keyboard having larger keys that make it easier to type on, so I'm leaning in that direction at the moment. In both cases I'll be upgrading to 2GB RAM, installing Win7, and using a 4GB SD card with ReadyBoost.

Are there any thoughts on which model is better? Are there other quality systems that I missed? Thanks for the help!
 
What about the Acer at Costco? Its 300, comes with a dual-core and a 250gb 7200rpm HD and a 6-cell battery.
 
misan-thrope said:
What about the Acer at Costco? Its 300, comes with a dual-core and a 250gb 7200rpm HD and a 6-cell battery.
Click to expand...
That would be great. Unfortunatly there aren't any Costco's around me that I can get to and that model doesn't appear on their website.
 
yep i've test drive both asus and dell, and out of both dell seems like they cramped keys on keyboard, while on asus it's like they didn't make me feel like it's netbook with just 10inch screen which is big+ for many users who has always used desktop keyboard
 
I would avoid getting a single core ATOM netbook. I have one and its slow. I bought another 12" netbook in the MSI U230 that has a dual core Athlon II X2 Neo processor and Radeon 3200 graphics. It is noticeably faster than my Acer netbook with single core Atom cpu and Intel GMA graphics. Especially when you looking at websites that have flash on it. The thing that I don't like about the 8.9" and 10.1" netbooks is the screen resolution. It's only 1024x600. Consider this Acer Aspire One Netbook also. It has a Dual Core cpu and the screen resolution is 1280x720. Plus, the Radeon HD 6250 graphics is much faster than the crappy Intel GMA 3150 that's in the Asus Netbook. The crappy thing about this Acer is max RAM support is only 1GB

Hmm.. my bad. Your trying to keep this under $300
 
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If you can push the budget higher, you can get a dual core netbook. I cant stand single core atom netbooks. It can be slow just looking at some webpages. Especially when browsing the Best Buy ads in flash. I have an Acer Aspire with Intel Atom N270 cpu and my sister-n-law has a Toshiba with Intel Atom N455 cpu. Both netbooks are slow.
 
I avoid flash as much as humanly possible while surfing. I can't stand how flash ads can cause a website to come to a total crawl, sometimes even with a duo core processor. It's ridiculous and I use a number of flash blockers to avoid them.

At the moment the models that I'm looking at are between $250-280, so even with the ram upgrade I'm still within my budget. If I go much higher with the price I'm in the low end PC market which I'm trying to stay away from at the moment. For the most part I think a single core EEE will probably work for my needs. Most of the heavy lifting gets done on the desktop in my office, I'm pretty much just looking for a machine to use on the couch for surfing, email, etc., while I watch TV.
 
Lenovo makes nice ones as well. They are some of the best netbooks I have used.
 
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