Actual stock at PC World finally coincided with my inclination to buy, so I am the proud owner of a new Samsung N150 netbook.
It has Windows 7 Starter and the latest Intel 'Pine Trail' processor.
And what a tremendous piece of kit it appears to be - so far.
I've spent the last few hours on set-up duties, it's a bit like moving house, isn't it?
I'll not be fully straight for a few days, but I've got the kitchen and lounge more or less in order and I've found the kettle and toaster.
Windows 7 is snappier than Vista, I've managed to download Firefox and iTunes, and loaded my music library from my back-up disc.
The machine itself invited me to create a restore partition, so that was another half-an-hour, and I've done a back-up to my usb drive.
Seems to me this netbook will do everything my full size laptop will do, provided you can live with the smaller screen.
It is quicker and has a claimed eight hour battery life.
I can see this becoming my main machine, particularly in the caravan.
So it looks like £280 well-spent.
www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/samsung-n150-04351428-pdt.html
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I have Celeron 1.8 (Yona core) with 1.5GB RAM on my laptop, it came with Vista Basic which was so awful I replaced it with Ubuntu (currently running 10.4).
Do you think 1GB RAM is enough? You might need to upgade that if you want to do a lot of video watching etc.
I need a new laptop as my Dell is falling to bits and I do have a netbook but it is a PIII and can only take upto 192MB RAM so the lack fo RAM is holding it back. It also has no battery so it only works on certain trains!
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Mon 3 May 10 at 22:31
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Rattle,
The only video I watch is the odd link to YouTube on here.
I don't do pictures, either.
The RAM should be more than enough for my needs - Windows 7 Starter is running faster than Vista Home Premiun on my 2GB laptop.
One of the things I read is 7 Starter doesn't have the media center (sic) - load of tosh, it's all there, not that I'll be using it.
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Samsung has won a lot of praise for its netbooks.
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>> Do you think 1GB RAM is enough? You might need to upgade that if you
>> want to do a lot of video watching etc.
windows 7 basic seems relatively happy in 1gb ram. Certainly is on Nicoles netbook.
for her basic mobile needs (edit ms word docs, surf, email, service the mp3 player, look at photos and access the home server) its fast enough
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Pleased to hear you have a new toy if. Have you taught it to play nice and share it's files with it's big brother? It's particularly easy if they both run W7.
JH
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...Have you taught it to play nice and share it's files with it's big brother?...
Transferred iTunes, as I mentioned above.
I use an iGoogle homepage and Hotmail, which comes up anyway, and I managed to import bookmarks into Firefox using an 'html' document that I emailed to myself.
Not much else I can think of.
There might be one or two things I've forgotten, but I'll pick those up over the coming days and weeks.
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make sure you choose a nice light unobtrusive AV suite. They dont have sufficeint horsepower to be bogged down by a heavyweight one
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...make sure you choose a nice light unobtrusive AV suite....
Er, would that be anti-virus suite?
It's McAfee at the moment - it was pre-loaded - lasts for three months then money has to change hands.
I expect Ill go to the free version of avast! then, or possibly have a look at Microsoft Security Essentials.
Unless anyone can come up with a better idea.
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MSE is fine, it appears to be the least hungry of them all. (yes I know unusual for a MS product) and it appears to do the job well enough. I dumped avast for MSE.
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 4 May 10 at 09:52
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Avast! is first class, free and with perhaps the best incentive to use for those who don't update regularly, in that it updates itself automatically and informs you by voice and message panel that it has done so.
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>> I dumped avast for MSE.
I followed Zero's lead - no problems yet.
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For a netbook I would not use anything but MSE. It really is perfect.
I sometimes find it refuses to install on some machines though without an explanation.
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I have a Samsung NC10, and have found the following alternative programs work quicker than the 'market leader'
-Picassa for organising your photos
-VLC media player for video
-Google Chrome for browsing (this also gives me the biggest viewing area, important for small screen)
-Avast! - But I didnt know about MSE, so this maybe better, but Avast doesn't seem to hog too much power.
- Foxit! PDF reader
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An endorsement for Picasa, VLC media player, Google Chrome, and MSE all of which have installed on my Acer netbook. (will take a look at Foxit)
Picasa is a brilliant program which integrates well with other other Google products.
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>> Picasa is a brilliant program which integrates well with other other Google products.
>>
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I agree, with one caveat; if you download a recent version ( 3.5 onwards IIRC) it automatically tries to run its face recognition feature on all your photos - which was taking rather along time on 15,000+ photos on my machine. Somewhere in the options menu you can turn it off.
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If you can afford the time to leave Picasa running, the face recognition thing is really very impressive. It gets good at people very quickly, and it's really nice being able to find photos of friends easily once it's done.
Good to hear about the MS AV suite, I'm running Windoze 7 under parallels on my new Mac, so obviously I want to keep the overhead of everything else as low as possible. It's mostly just there to allow me to run a couple of programs in parallel with Mac OS.
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I've been using my Samsung N150 for a couple of weeks now and thumbs remain firmly pointed up.
It suits my use perfectly, messing around on here, moderate emailing, the odd photo and the occasional radio programme download from iPlayer.
Battery life reaches close to the claimed seven or eight hours, and a netbook is much easier to carry from room to room when it's open - always worried about dropping the full-size laptop.
Screen's plenty big enough width-wise, although it's more modest depth means there's some scrolling of larger documents.
Windows 7 does the job and is a bit more intuitive than some of Microsoft's earlier operating systems, though still not a patch on Apple's.
The keyboard is fine for size, but I would prefer keys with more of a click - there's a £300 Sony netbook which has this, but the battery life isn't very good.
I'm well-pleased with my new netbook, and I can't see me using my full-size laptop very much unless my computing requirements change dramatically.
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A new netbook - at last. - RattleandSmoke
