My adventures with computers, and a review of the EEE PC 900

[elettaria]

It's odd to look back at what computers were like fifteen years ago. When I was growing up, the internet was unheard-of, floppy disks were floppy, screens were green on black, printers were dot matrix, computer games were so basic that they now have retro charm, I was one of the few students at my school writing my homework on the computer, and I

Comments

[elettaria]

Sounds like they ironed out the XP bugs then. They'd have had to, the product would have been a flop otherwise. Netbooks have a relatively high return rate as it is, I believe due to people not getting on with Linux, deciding that they'd rather have something with better storage, or having trouble using such a small laptop. And of course they know they're going to be dealing with that upfront, it's just that it can be hard to gauge what it will really be like to experience, plus you'll always get some people who don't bother to read the spec before buying. Anyway, no trouble when you enlarged your fonts, such as what I described? How much did you enlarge them? Can you keep the netbook at the standard viewing distance you'd use for an ordinary laptop? Is there any difference doing this on an XP machine as opposed to a Linux one?

The problem with the audiobooks is that they're in DAISY format. This is partly because it's meant to offer all sorts of special facilities, although in practice they don't bother addings page number divisions and so forth to the novels (just the reference works, they tell me), and partly so that people don't start copying their audiobooks and disseminating them all over the internet. If you get the books sent to you on a CD, then they're also in MP3 format and can be played on other software. However, if you go for online streaming, which is about a hundred times more convenient, then the only software that will play the audiobooks is the one supplied by RNIB, NetPlexTalk, and that only works on Windows. I pay £50 per year to have full access to their entire library, I can have whichever book I want instantly as long as my internet connection and their server are both working, and I use this service almost every day. So until RNIB find better software that will play on non-Windows machines and also have fewer annoying habits (there'll be a review of it sooner or later), which at my guess will be a year or more if ever, I'm stuck with Windows machines.

Wine looks very interesting, though. If I get to the point where I might consider a Linux machine, I'll find someone who can test whether NetPlexTalk can be used with Wine or something similar. I'd still rather not have the hassle of knowing that a lot of applications won't work, or might only work with a lot of tinkering. Also I'd want to avoid bogging down my system, I multitask enough to upset it as it is. Of course, Windows tends to be rather a system hog, so do you think it bogs it down more to have Windows or Linux + Wine?