(no subject)

[carmen_lj]

I seem to want a netbook. The prospect of having a properly light and dinky computer for travellings sounds ridiculously good. I am dead judgey that the one I like has numerous colours for the case and I've seen an advert for it where there's not a single mention of power or RAM or storage or useful stuff like that but much time spent on how it can MATCH YOUR OTHER ACCESSORIES. And it's particularly irritating because I do like pink rather a lot but there's no way I can buy that one after that sort of marketing. ALAS.

Comments

[some-stars.livejournal.com]

uggghhh i hate that kind of advertising. and i even bought mine in part because it's blue! BUT ONLY IN PART. (it's a toshiba mini and i am in love with it, if you are interested.)

[calapine.livejournal.com]

There's a green one that it rather spiffy, but I don't want the guilt I will get from KNOWING HOW IT WAS ADVERTISED. It's extremely irritating. And hurrah for love, yes!

[gordon-r-d.livejournal.com]

There was similar marketing for the lilac PSP recently, bundled with the Hannah Montana game and more or less advertised as "It's lilac so it's for girls!"

Whereas Korea bundled it with Soul Calibur and made the tenous connection between lilac and the colour of Ivy's hardly there costume.

Until this week I'd used netbooks as my main computers for eighteen months, they are definitely worth it. I'm still using mine for going places and stuff.

[calapine.livejournal.com]

See, I would totally cool with a lilac PSP, if I wanted a PSP, but OMG NO WAY WOULD I BUY IT WITH HANNAH MONTANA. Korea appears much more sensible, well done them.

[gordon-r-d.livejournal.com]

My Aspire One is a lovely dark blue, I had a choice of blue or white, but the blue one was twenty quid cheaper. I try to get black versions of things mostly, but did end up with a white PSP because it was also twenty quid cheaper than the other colours. :)

[calapine.livejournal.com]

I try not to get white things. They annoy me unreasonably. I blame the Gameboy, and that was more grey than white really.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, apparently white ASUS/Acer netbooks are more expensive than other-than-white ones. Buh?

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I've seen an advert for it where there's not a single mention of power or RAM or storage or useful stuff like that but much time spent on how it can MATCH YOUR OTHER ACCESSORIES.

Augh, I hate that too. (Mine matches my other accessories because it's gloss-black - it's an ASUS EeePC 901 - but I *did* pick it over a bunch of others for its tech-specs. Particularly, battery life, since I like to write with it.)

[calapine.livejournal.com]

I quite like the idea of a puter that is not silver/black but that is v v v far down the list of Reasons For Purchase, ye gods. It is an amusing extra, goodness sake, NOW TELL ME THE VIDEO CARD SPEC PLS.

[rhipowered.livejournal.com]

I've heard good things about ASUS' netbooks, fyi.

...I might have a MacBook in part because it is Pretty.

[calapine.livejournal.com]

I fear Macs because they are Different and Different is Scary.

[rhipowered.livejournal.com]

I did too but then I was converted and have seen the light, what is shiny and gleaming and all of the text is kerned and anti-aliased by default.

(More like if I want to do any actual editing for film/TV one requires a Mac so it was a bit of a forced convert.)

[ghost2.livejournal.com]

I recently got an HP Mini netbook as a gift (black; I had no say about the color), and it's great for Internet browsing and light stuff like using Notepad. I take it when I go out to the library, because I can get free wireless and it's so much lighter and smaller than my laptop. The netbook will be coming with me when I go to Chicago TARDIS. I'll find a way to cram it into my bag.

[calapine.livejournal.com]

Yah, I've taken my laptop to France before and it's bloody annoying, suspect would get even more irritated at intercontinental inconvienceness, and would quite like not to be computerless at cons.

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

As long as it's not the Della model...

[calapine.livejournal.com]

Is that a Dell one? Dell loves me! Or at least doesn't hate me.

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's Dell's mini-netbook "for women". Its marketing campaign caused quite a bit of ruckus in the feminist blogosphere.

[calapine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, possibly that's the one? (Hence the guilt of buying it. It's cheap, but has a good enough spec for what I want it for. But THE GUILT. Thus, my annoyance.) It's not got that godawful name, but it does have irritating cutesy colour names.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Was that the ASUS Eee Surf btw? I know that it does come in pistachio-green and cherry-blossom pink, which are v. cute, but specs-wise (2GB disk space, processing power, 7in screen size) it's not terribly hefty.

...looks like ASUS discontinued it, my bad. On the other hand, I can recommend the 901s as a good tradeoff between pretty darn good processing power (Intel Atom processor), 20GB disk drive, and half-day battery life. And now they're the ones that come in cool colours.

[calapine.livejournal.com]

I shall look up this thing and consider, it sounds most shiny, yes.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

If you want an Asus EEE PC, I'll sell you my (black) one cheap at ChicagoTARDIS, because I HATE it. The keyboard is tiny, so is the screen, and I've used punchcard computers that weren't so slow to respond.

[airie-fairy.livejournal.com]

That's how everything's marketed now. :/ If you're really wanting the pink, use it as an excuse to at least look into the relevant information about it to see if it's pink and worth it.

[jack-cole.livejournal.com]

I have heard good things about ASUS, and also Lenovo. Samsung makes one that gets something like 7 hours for battery life which is astounding and blows everyone else out of the water...It's called the NC10 and I think they made a 'sequel' that's the N110 or something similar. Don't know if it's available across the pond, but with teh Internets that doesn't matter so much I suppose.

Here's a WIRED article about the battery life (Mostly about how they got an extra hour by putting in a solid state HD, but it talks about the battery time with stock specs too):
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/11/tricked-out-sam/#previouspost

[neadods.livejournal.com]

The only problem is that you're paying in weight for extra battery time. The Wind netbook with a 7-hour battery weighs more than my full-sized laptop.

[jack-cole.livejournal.com]

Not really with the Samsung...if you look at the article it only uses a 6-cell battery, while most full-size notebooks use a 9 or 12.

[sonatine.livejournal.com]

Is this the Vivienne Tam one? They are so fucking cute but apparently because it has Girly Shit on it HP has decided they can market it as a fashion accessory for twice the price!

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I love my netbook.

[alawston.livejournal.com]

On that kind of marketing, one of my favourite bits of TV ever was faintly obscure Children's BBC comedy Pirates (with Liz Smith, for great justice) in which 'Roger Bones' goes into a showroom to buy a car and spends five minutes demanding: 'A red car. With a horn that goes badda-da-da-dadda-badda-da-da-dah.'

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

I have an ASUS netbook (black, like my heart), and I am quite in love with it -- except that the keyboard is a bit sticky, especially the spacebar. Apparently this is a common problem with black EeePCs.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I adore my netbook, although it is boring black. But it is boring black with a near full-sized keyboard and a fast processor, which makes up for much. (HP 1030)

[fyrdrakken]

I've been vaguely feeling the want for a smaller travelling computer, and the two things holding me back were A) trying to pay off my Dell account and B) my current laptop being the one computer I have left that's running XP and hence required for interfacing with the toys that don't play well with Vista.

However. At D*C my laptop was being cranky about internetz browsing, and then last night flipping through the latest advert Dell had sent me I couldn't help but notice wee laptops in the $300-500 range and a few of them packaged with XP rather than Vista, so. I may be succumbing in the near future.

I should clarify, regarding laptop vs. travelling computer: My first laptop wound up being the only computer I had when my old hand-me-down desktop died shortly thereafter, and was tiny enough to stick in my backpack for weekend adventures. My next couple of laptops were purchased to be my sole computers, but now I've shifted to desktop with laptops only for travel and the odd device interface. So a cheap weentsy laptop I could fit in a backpack is now sounding like a better idea than trying to max out the screen size and get the best possible on all features, when the reverse was true of laptops purchased to be my sole computer...

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

and a few of them packaged with XP rather than Vista

Oh yes indeed. If I'm gonna be buying an itty-bitty and thus almost certainly underpowered computer, I want it to be able to make full use of its hardware. My opinion on Vista has softened since the laptop with that OS preinstalled turned out to be perfectly serviceable as is, but I'm never going to believe that Vista would know efficiency -- the amount of RAM it needs to do its thing still makes me boggle -- if it came up and bit it on the metaphorical nose.