I decided to jump into the netbook arena when I saw a nice brown (yes, I also have a brown Zune) Acer One for under $300 (got mine for $270 before they became more popular). With 1gb RAM and a 16gb SSD for a hard drive I figured I'd see what it could do. It came with XP home and an Office 2007 trial pre-loaded. My first impression was that I was actually kind of impressed with the performance. Web-browsing, document manipulation, and general futzing around seemed on par with your average 2+ year old PC.
I started getting a little bored. I was reading about the virtues of Ubuntu, a Linux-based OS. Long story short, I loaded fresh install of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and found it to be...meh? Sure, the UI was a little snappier in a few areas. I really liked the Desktop and how that worked. Finding Windows-equivalent applications was relatively easy once I figured out software installation works in Ubuntu (pretty nifty, by the way). I had a few challenges finding the right drivers for some stuff, but all-in-all it was pretty straight-forward.
Time to take it on the road. After all, that's why I got the thing right? Well, it travels well and made my standard laptop seem like a "luggable" from back in the day. Battery life isn't stellar with my 3-cell battery, but I did make it all the way through "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" on the plane--unfortunately. The 6-cell obviously has a longer life but makes it all heavier and sticks out funny. Wi-fi picked up hotspots with ease.
The rub. I'm a gadget-man and not ashamed to admit it. I love it when gadgets work and hate it when they don't. On my first trip traveling with the Ubuntu netbook, I found out that I couldn't get several of my favorite gadgets to work with Ubuntu. My dive computer, GPS watch, and Zune (yes, the brown one) did not have compatible drivers and/or software. Maybe it's possible under various flavors of emulators, but I tried really, really hard with no luck. The other major issue I had with Ubuntu was with OpenOffice. While I admire the efforts of that community, OpenOffice acts and feels like imitation crab. It's a workable substitute, but you won't enjoy it.
After the road trip, it was back to XP. I installed a netbook-friendly "flavor" of XP, reloaded all my favorite Windows-friendly apps and...well...now the thing ran like crap. DON'T USE NTFS ON AN SSD DRIVE!
Thanks to the good folks at PartitionMagic, I was able to drop down to Fat32 and things were back to smooth sailing. Replacing the 512mb RAM module with a 1gb module was a bit of a chore but probably worth the $20.
Now let's crank things up...
What would happen if I wanted to use this bugger as an emergency web-dev tool? I loaded all of my basic "go-to" development apps including: .NET Frameworks 2.0 & 3.5, Web Developer Express 2008, SQL Server Express 2008 + Management Studio, IIS 7.0, Silverlight 2 & 3, and some other lightweight apps).
The verdict? It works! Realistically, I'm not going to use this for day-to-day work, but as an on-the-road-in-a-pinch, I would feel confident in being able to pound out some inspired code on the fly or jump in to work on an emergency situation.
Thursday, 30 July 2009 07:12