Late last fall, when I was first contemplating replacements for my four year-old Dell Inspiron laptop, Netbooks piqued my interest. I gave them serious consideration as a replacement machine, but there were three major problems:
1. Screen sizes suck, especially the vertical. The most common (at the time) were 1024×576, which was a huge step down from my Inspiron’s massive 1920×1200 display, but it’s all in the name of portability, right? Actually seeing how bad 576 vertical pixels is requires you to run any Office 2007 application. For example, Outlook 2007, with its “ribbon” and address fields, takes up nearly half of the 576 pixels:
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| Windows Ready … for all those utilities you’ll need to keep the system secure. |
2. They run Windows XP - When I start my computer, I want to use my computer. I don’t want to wait five minutes while the operating system boots, self-flagellates and every application phones home to download updates. (I’m talking about *you* Java and Adobe Flash.) In the back of my mind, I kept thinking about what I wrote in my rant from last year and the excessive amounts of required maintenance… just to use practice safe hex.
In theory, you would avoid rebooting by using “hibernate mode.” (This is where the machine writes out its memory image to disk so the computer can be completely powered down. When you restart, the image is loaded, and you’re right where you were before.) This never worked on the Inspiron. Come to think of it, it doesn’t work on my work machines, either.
“Sleep mode,” where the computer enters a catatonic state, functions marginally better… except the NetGear and Intel wireless drivers would sometimes and always, respectively, crap themselves on restart. The drawback of sleep mode is it still consumes battery. Every once in a while, the orbital mind control lasers command the machine to wake up in the carry-on bag.
3. Netbooks come with 1Gb - One gig was fine for Windows 2000 (the most stable of the Windows brethren) in 2000. It’s insufficient for XP and unbearable on Vista.
Conclusion: A netbook wouldn’t do.
You’re missing the point, all around. Netbooks aren’t for Microsoft or for Windows. They are good for the scaled-down “remix” versions of Ubuntu. They are a step above the spazzes you see trying to t9 their next novel, but are smaller and cheaper than a full laptop.
Need Powerpoint? Need to compose email in Word? Yeah, you need a full laptop. Now find me the thinnest, cheapest, longest-life Windows 7 laptop on the market with a full-size keyboard. STAT!
So that’s why my work machine with windows XP takes so long to start up. Do you know if windows 7 is any better?
You’re right, but I wouldn’t write them off completely. I agree with you on point #1, but as to point #2, ours seems to run as fast as our full-on desktops, even with the paranoid security suite I run.
My wife recently bought the Acer 10.1″ w/ Windows XP Home and I’m constantly surprised at how fast it runs. She’s very happy using it for web browsing and the occasional use of word.
When I went laptop shopping and bought my Toshiba P305 w/ 4 GB RAM and 400 GB hard drive space and the 17.1″ widescreen I was looking for a different animal: I wanted to run VMware and dev tools. It was great for my SQL class and has no trouble with MS SQL Express.
A lot of it depends on how you’re going to use it and what else you have in the house. She knew when she bought it we had 2 desktops and the uber-laptop in the house already. Would I be happy with her laptop as my only or primary computer? No.
-Eric
Regarding #1 – You know that you can minimize the Ribbon. In that mode it will pop-out, you pick a button, and it goes away.
I agree with you on the rest. As we get used to the immediate response of smart phones we start questioning why something with many times the processing power takes so effing long to start up.
Mikeonhisbike:
In my experience, Windows XP Professional starts up reasonably quickly (especially compared to Windows 2000 or Vista on the same hardware) UNTIL you add it to a Windows domain. Once joined to the domain, startup times blow out to 3x or more as it does all of that “domainy” stuff (querying the AD, applying group policies, running startup scripts, squaring the circle, unladening the swallow etc).
If you work for a large, multi-site organisation that hasn’t designed their domain properly it can blow out even further, as your desktop PC waits for response from a domain controller on the other side of the planet, rather than talking to the one in the server room next door.
That said, on a single-site domain, on the same *modern* desktop hardware, Windows 7 starts up so much faster (even when connected to a domain) than Windows XP that you don’t ever want to touch an XP machine again :-) And then you remember that at the moment 1/4 of your hardware fleet isn’t up to running Windows 7, and you know XP will be with you at least another year:-(
Then again, my EeePC netbook boots XP Home so quickly it always surprises me, and all of the doftware I want on it works, so I won’t be upgrading the OS on that one any time soon.