Follow us on TwitterI was on the road for the past three weeks or so. During my travels, I dropped my briefcase, which contained two computers, my work laptop and my personal netbook (an Acer Aspire One).
My work laptop was fine.
At first, I thought my netbook was OK, too. But slowly, features began to disappear. First, left mouse button, then clicking on the glide pad, then the right mouse button. I could work around those using a USB mouse.
But the killer was losing the ALT key.
I thought that maybe the problem was software, so I reloaded the operating system. No luck.
So, I guess it’s time to buy a new netbook. (Actually, I’ve been looking for a reason to do so. But I was planning on subsidizing the cost by selling my old netbook. Oh, well…)
With all of the recent introductions (some of which are not available yet), there are a lot of choices. So, I’ll use the opportunity to explore as many as possible.
My requirements are different than most. Here is what is important to me.
- Must have a Linux OS. (It’s a personal preference.)
- Must have a keyboard that I can touch-type on. That especially means a full-size right shift key.
- Must be thin and light (since I carry this and a laptop in the same bag).
- Prefer 6+ hours of battery life (so it lasts a whole plane trip), but I might be willing to accept shorter battery life to keep the netbook thin and light.
- If I can get better resolution than 1024×600, without adding too much to the size/weight, then I would do so.
- I don’t need a hard drive. I don’t store much on the netbook. Just about everything I need is online. A solid-state drive with 8-16 GB is smaller and lighter.
- Of course, it has to be a good value.
One other requirement, between my wife, my son Steve (who works with me to maintain this site) and his wife, we already have three different netbooks:
- Acer Aspire One 9″ with XP
- MSI Wind U100 with XP
- Samsung NC10 with XP
So, I’d like to get something different.
As my evaluation progresses, I’ll keep you posted.
