Plumbing the wisdom of the friendslist.

[dkellis]

Planning to get a really, really small and lightweight notebook.

All I need is a word-processing function, sufficient hard disk space for said function, and a music player of some sort for mp3s. Internet capability will be nice, and sought after, but not completely essential

Comments

[uchuukuukan]

I love my Asus Eee PC. Definitely no complaints about battery life. Love the price. Love linux.

Love LyX. What You See Is What You Mean. To me, the real way to write a book. (^_^)

[kalium]

Oh man, LyX.

If you want to work with LaTeX, you pretty much deserve what you get.

[kitchenqueen]

I just got this machine in August, and it's pretty nifty. Battery life is pretty long. I don't often use it unplugged, but when I have, it seems to take a LOOOONG time to get a low battery message. In fact, I don't think I ever have, and I've used this thing unplugged for a few hours at a time. It's not that heavy.

Cons on it - it does have a lot of memory and a kickin' vid card, which makes it heat up a lot when I play CoX. It has vista. *shudder*

The top 1/3 to 1/2 is all speakers, so the sound, when I have it up, is pretty good. I don't often play music through the computer, since I have a Bose dock for my ipod, and that's much better sound.

It's an HP Pavilion dv-5-1017 nr notebook and ran me about $1k.

[stereophilic]

I have an Asus Eee 901 that I largely use for my schoolwork, which means loads and loads of Word documents. It has little memory, but works splendidly for my purposes. It sounds like it'll work well for yours too. Mine runs on XP, but I haven't had a problem and the price is, of course, a very attractive thing. :D No real problems with the battery life either; the only model I felt had a real problem was the 900, the rest are pretty reasonable.

[rinnegan]

What was your problem with the 900? I'm looking into getting one (the 900HA) and I'd definitely like to hear about any downsides.

I'm still not sure though if I would like to go with a Linux based or an XP based system. I kind of want a larger hard drive and they seem to only come with the XP systems.

[stereophilic]

It was largely the battery life of the 900 I was concerned about, because I needed it to last several 3 hour lectures potentially without a powersource nearby. XD You have have read the battery issues in the 900's wiki - since dkellis is located in Singapore at the moment, I was referring to specifically what is obtainable locally and I'm not quite sure it's the same for you over in Canada. The 900, from what I could garner online and when I went out to buy it, comes with a 4-cell battery while the 901, which is not too different [and in particular, not too different in price which I was really up on XD], comes with a 6-cell and has around two hours more battery life than the 900 [which I think was estimated about 3-4 hours max, the length of one lecture

[rinnegan]

Thanks, I had already read that the battery life was only 4-5 hours on the 900HA, which is something that doesn't truly concern me, as I am almost always going to be using it on AC power. I also am aware that the 120gb HD in the model I am interested in makes it less "roughneck," but since I am not particularly violent with things that I own that cost me more than a dollar, that also does not make me worry too much.

Did you get a model that has the trackpad features in it? If so, how are they? Useful? Fun for 5 minutes and then not worth playing with anymore? I think they are a great addition to an already great hardware and I'm looking forward to playing around with it.