Hi all first time poster so be gentle.
Basically I'm after a mini laptop but i don't know much about them.
I'm on a low budget of a max of £400 but ideally would like to spend no more than £300.
What i have noticed that 90% of them don't have dvd drives and i was wondering how i could install games on it such as football manager, nothing too graphically challenging to the system.
I also noticed that they seem to have either windows xp or linux. Is this because Vista is a demanding OS and will Windows 7 be an option in the next few months?
Any advice is appreciated :good:
Also just a quickie about portable hard drives, if i install a game on one will this game be available on whichever system i plug the hard drive into e.g on my laptop and pc as a guy at work says you can't.
1.) They keep costs down, and improve battery life, by not including CD/DVD drivers. The solution? A portable DVD drive. I personally have a nice laptop DVD burner in an external case that's power through USB, I send that along with my wife to use with her netbook and it's never let her down.
2.) XP and Linux work on systems with lower-end specs, which is why they're popular in netbooks. Vista requires more resources than most netbooks have out-of-the-box, but there are a couple of netbooks available that come with Vista Basic installed. I can't see any version except Basic working on most netbooks due to their lack of a decent graphics card setup. Windows 7 might be an option in future models, but I doubt it unless they start including more RAM and a decent graphics chipset.
3.) When you install a game in Windows, there are registry settings installed in your Windows Registry. So, unless you have the exact same installation of the exact same game with absolutely no differences between the installs on all of your computers, I don't foresee being able to install games on an external HDD and swapping it between computers. I may be wrong, I'm not a huge computer gamer, so I'm going solely off of how Windows installations work. There
are ways to make the installation 'portable' on applications, so maybe this is possible with games as well? Again, I'm not into gaming on my PC's, so someone else will need to chime in on this one.
Now, do you have any specific reason to stick with Windows? Ubuntu is a great OS, is much easier on resources, is much more visually appealing and, in my opinion, much easier to use (although, new users coming from Windows
will have a learning curve).
That being said, I recently purchased the Gateway LT2016u for my fiancé. It's basically the same thing as the Gateway LT20xx listed on Gateway's website with the exception of the additional CDMA/GSM radio for 3G internet. This netbook is basically the Acer D250 in a Gateway shell, and the D250 can be had for around $250 USD. The Gateway version is about $300 in stores here in the US. I personally thing the Acer D250 looks like a kids toy, and the Gateway LT20 looks more professional/clean, which is one reason why I opted for the Gateway.
I'm sure pricing isn't too much different from here to you, so maybe you can look into the Acer/Gateway lineup and see if either the LT20 (Gateway) or D250 netbooks fit your needs and price-point?
EDIT: I should also note that the Gateway LT20's come with 6 cell batteries, good for about 6 hours of usage with 3G or WiFi enabled. The Acer D250's I keep seeing for $250 in stores appear to come with a 3 cell, which is good for about 3-4 hours of usage with WiFi enabled.
