I gave my laptop to my sister when she started uni. Well, I lent it her so she could work out what kind of laptop she wanted. It’s what she wants though so I’ve left it for her to have. Getting on now but good for her and nice and portable with a 13.3″ screen with out being too small for her. Managed to get a new motherboard and DVD RW put in it before I gave it to her as well for nothing

Now I’ve become more increasingly stuck and annoyed at not having a laptop since!

I’ve been pondering over all these netbooks for a while, well ever since Asus launched their first one. I found the screen size and res on that though to be completely useless. I decided I would hang on till Christmas as I’d read how all the manufactures were bringing out their own. You’ve now got HP, Acer, ASUS, Samsung.. it goes on.

I’ve been looking at 10″ netbooks with the Atom processor in since they appeared recently. The more powerful “ultra mobile” netbooks just don’t justify the performance for stupid cost for me. I need internet access etc, nothing fancy. The 10″ ones are all of a muchness to be honest. So why did I decide to go for the Asus eee 1000H? 2 main things.

• Battery life. It has a 6 cell battery and quoted up to 7.5 hours battery life. The Acer One has only a 3 cell battery for example.
• Linux. The eee has a whole “branch” of Ubuntu especially for it. With everything already compiled and set up that you should need to get the best out of your eee. I’ve used Ubuntu of recent as I am Linux fan girl and it is incredibly simple to install and just go, and works. I was once a Gentoo lover, but of recent I just don’t have the time to spend endless hours fiddling to get it to work and waiting for things to compile and the such. I still love and appreciate the point of it though, compile exactly what you want means better performance, a “polished” system. Yay if I had the time!

I have had debates with people on my hard drive choice as well since deciding on it. I have gone for a standard old skool SATA drive, 160GB in size. Yes I agree solid state hard drives are cool. Cost and the huge size difference (40Gb compared to 160GB) just simply won me over here though. My last laptop has had the same hard drive with no problems for years, been all over the place with me, no problems. If I dropped my laptop I would be more concerned about the screen or something! Also I doubt the thing would be on either as I don’t carry laptops around in standby or anything. I think of the whole coolness of solid state hard drives just makes them sound better than they pratically are.

This one comes with XP on it which I think I’ll leave a very basic install of on it as I have the space. I’ll end up using this for work or something one day and be so bloody thankful I have Windows on it, I know it.

Well, I get it tomorrow night. Then have my mum for the whole of the weekend including friday night, so god knows when I’ll actually get to sit down and play with it. That’s my point. I don’t have time to play these days, I just need something practical! Which this is, very much so.

I currently have 36 comments between me, Brett (TheMole), and Steev on my Facebook status on this. Mad.