Hardware Update
Skippy the Streambook had his first outing yesterday.
I haven't quite finished setting him up yet, which led to some interesting delays as I adjusted settings and kept finding more built-in crap to turn off. I suspect I'll be doing that for quite some time, as I keep discovering more things that Micro$oft wants to "help" me with and having to go digging to shut them down. Windows 10 is being quite an experience; at first it was like having to learn to use a computer all over again, but I'm staring to get the hang of it.
So Skippy went to the write-in. Results were mixed. The battery life is excellent; five hours untethered, much of it with the wifi going, and the battery was only down to about 71%. On the down side, I kept getting save errors; I suspect the "out of memory or drive space" was Windows monopolizing the system resources with some update or process I hadn't asked for. (Wonder if the library's woefully slow internet contributed to that? It hasn't done it at home.) Hopefully continued turning off of things behind the scenes will help with that.
I did not, when deciding that the rather petite hard drive would be okay, take into account that Windows would eat half of it. Or more than half, but there's still some 7 gigs free. And I never meant to keep much data on the hard drive anyway; a small-size-high-capacity USB drive is definitely in the near future.
The keyboard worked very nicely, however. Quite comfortable to write on, and there's enough tactile feedback that I felt reasonably confident of my key contact. The extremely low profile of the machine means that it's comfortable for extended typing even without something to prop up the back edge for a better angle. The screen, which was very hard on my eyes in our poorly-lit living room, didn't bother me a bit under the library's fluorescents.
(And it's a good thing I did break down and get a backup machine, as the main "work" laptop was unusable last night. No keyboard I can work around; a keyboard that constantly types "eeeeeeee" by itself is more of an obstacle.)
Overall, I think Skippy will be fine for what he is, though putting Windows 10 on a machine of such limited capacity was an act of wild overoptimism on someone's part.
This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/189528.html because I got tired of dealing with whatever LiveJournal had broken this time. Comment whereever.
I haven't quite finished setting him up yet, which led to some interesting delays as I adjusted settings and kept finding more built-in crap to turn off. I suspect I'll be doing that for quite some time, as I keep discovering more things that Micro$oft wants to "help" me with and having to go digging to shut them down. Windows 10 is being quite an experience; at first it was like having to learn to use a computer all over again, but I'm staring to get the hang of it.
So Skippy went to the write-in. Results were mixed. The battery life is excellent; five hours untethered, much of it with the wifi going, and the battery was only down to about 71%. On the down side, I kept getting save errors; I suspect the "out of memory or drive space" was Windows monopolizing the system resources with some update or process I hadn't asked for. (Wonder if the library's woefully slow internet contributed to that? It hasn't done it at home.) Hopefully continued turning off of things behind the scenes will help with that.
I did not, when deciding that the rather petite hard drive would be okay, take into account that Windows would eat half of it. Or more than half, but there's still some 7 gigs free. And I never meant to keep much data on the hard drive anyway; a small-size-high-capacity USB drive is definitely in the near future.
The keyboard worked very nicely, however. Quite comfortable to write on, and there's enough tactile feedback that I felt reasonably confident of my key contact. The extremely low profile of the machine means that it's comfortable for extended typing even without something to prop up the back edge for a better angle. The screen, which was very hard on my eyes in our poorly-lit living room, didn't bother me a bit under the library's fluorescents.
(And it's a good thing I did break down and get a backup machine, as the main "work" laptop was unusable last night. No keyboard I can work around; a keyboard that constantly types "eeeeeeee" by itself is more of an obstacle.)
Overall, I think Skippy will be fine for what he is, though putting Windows 10 on a machine of such limited capacity was an act of wild overoptimism on someone's part.
This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/189528.html because I got tired of dealing with whatever LiveJournal had broken this time. Comment whereever.