Living With A Netbook – 7 Months Later

In August 2009 I bought a refurbished Dell mini 10v netbook. The specs are exactly the same as when I bought it, that being a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, wi-fi a/b/g/n and not much else.

Make no mistake, this is a low-spec computer. It has the equivalent computing power of a PC built in the early 2000s.

Has anything busted on the netbook?

Not a thing. This little Dell has proven to be a solid build. Dare I say, it’s the most tightly constructed Dell portable I’ve ever used. In fact it’s the first Dell laptop I’ve ever used that has absolutely no creaks/squeaks when opening or shutting the lid, a nice change of pace.

So what’s changed?

All changes/adjustments I’ve made have had everything to do with software to accommodate the low screen resolution and low hardware specs.

Operating System

The unit shipped with Windows XP Home Edition. I used that until the Windows 7 preview was released. Once I switched to that, it was wonderful. I gained a full hour of extra battery life because of 7′s enhanced power saver features. Dell also had native Windows 7 drivers at the ready, and that helped (particularly with the touchpad and screen). The only thing that didn’t work was the integrated webcam, but I don’t use that so I didn’t lose anything I needed to work.

Then came the "doomsday" message several months later that the Win 7 preview was expiring. I thought about buying a license and decided against it because I simply could not see putting $100 towards an OS license for a $300 computer. It just seemed a bit ridiculous to put a full third of the entire computer’s cost just for the OS.

At that point I switched to Ubuntu. Everything worked (even the webcam), save for one huge problem – the touchpad. All touchpads use proprietary software to do just about everything, and Ubuntu’s support for it was bad. Pointer acceleration options were difficult to work with and drag-and-drop was a nightmare. It was because of this I had to ditch Ubuntu, because I couldn’t have a computer with a mouse that didn’t work correctly. Maybe Ubuntu 10.04 will have better native support for touchpads, and I’ll be sure to check it out when released next month.

After that debacle I went back to XP because I was forced to. I immediately hated that I lost Win 7′s power saver features, and the fact with XP it’s a crapshoot whether auto-hibernation will work or not. Put another way, I simply can’t trust XP to go into hibernation on its own, and this is a known issue with that OS. You can follow all the advice on the subject, but chances are high you’ll still never be able to make it work correctly. Such is life with XP.

But as said a moment ago, I do look forward to Ubuntu 10, and I’m crossing fingers the touchpad will actually work correctly in that OS. If it does, chances are good I’ll be dumping XP for it without a second thought.

My recommendations concerning a netbook OS

If you have a netbook and it has XP on it, stick with that for the time being until Ubuntu has better native support for netbook hardware. Watch for my reports on this in the near future when Ubuntu 10 is officially released.

DO NOT buy a netbook with Windows 7 "Starter" Edition – this is junk. That OS is so watered down it’s just plain ridiculous. If purchasing one with Win 7 preinstalled, make VERY sure that it’s the Home Premium Edition. If you get one with Starter, you will regret it. Trust me on that one.

Web Browser

It is painfully obvious that both IE and Firefox are not suited for low-spec computers such as netbooks. Running either even with no add-ons/plugins is a chore. Load time is slow. Tabs are slow. Page rendering is slow. When you scroll, there are stutters and pauses. It is extremely frustrating.

One could easily blame the computer for this, but that’s not the case. Both IE and FF are simply too bloated for their own good.

For a while I dealt with Firefox’s bloat because I don’t like IE nor do I like Chrome or Safari.

But then Opera 10 was released – and now it’s my primary browser on my netbook. Opera 10 + netbook go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s one of the few web browsers that does full-screen mode correctly, tabs are lightning quick on launch and close, HTML forms work better and faster, there is no stuttering/pausing when scrolling, etc. It just works.

My only complaint about Opera 10 is that it at times doesn’t handle Flash very well. In those instances I load up Firefox. But for everything else (which is a lot), it’s Opera 10 all the way on the netbook.

In the end, the two best choices for a fast usable browser on a netbook are Opera and Chrome.

What about IE 9 and Firefox 4?

Both IE 9 and Firefox 4 when released are supposed to be a lot more speedy compared to what we have now, and it can’t come a moment too soon. In the race to see which will arrive first, that will most likely be IE 9 being that the preview release already exists for it. I have no idea if either will run as fast as Chrome or Opera does, but hopefully they will.

Everything Else

I compute on the netbook the opposite I do for my desktop PC. With the desktop I stay local. Most things are saved direct to the hard drive, external HDD or USB stick.

On the netbook I purposely "live in the browser" as much as I can, and my recommendation is for anyone else that uses a netbook to do the same. It’s not that the netbook can’t handle local storage, it’s that chances are high you won’t be using it as your primary computer. That being the case, the best way to go about doing things is web, web, web or sync, sync, sync.

The difference between web and sync

Web: You specifically load the service via a web site. Email is webmail, docs are handled with an online service like Google Docs, and so on.

Sync: You use actual client programs but have them synchronized between computers via the internet. With email, that would be IMAP. With a browser, an example is Opera’s Opera Link or Xmarks for Firefox/IE/Chrome/Safari.

In other words, web means everything is in the browser, and sync means some of it is while the client handles most of the "grunt" work.

Resolution workarounds

Netbooks come with either 1024×576 or 1024×600 resolution, and yes you will at times run into issues with it. With some web pages you will encounter horizontal scroll bars, and some applications will run out of vertical space.

Working around resolution limitations can be a challenge. In the browser, the easiest way is to simply use full-screen mode by pressing F11. In the configuration of XP, purposely hide the taskbar and use the "classic" theme to make the top toolbars for app windows as small (but still usable) as possible.

The Big Question: Is a netbook usable?

Yes, it is.

The second Big Question: Can you use a netbook as your primary computer?

Answer: You could, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Netbooks are marketed primarily as "companion" computers, and this is an accurate way to describe them. A netbook is the computer you use when you want something very portable and very cheap. You’ll get both with the netbook and you can use it daily without fear of it falling apart on you.

A quick list of apps and how well they work on a netbook

Internet Explorer 8

Works. Launching tabs is a bit slow.

Mozilla Firefox 3.6

Works. Slow to launch. Tabs are much faster than IE, but the browser is a memory hog and will need to be restarted periodically.

OpenOffice 3

Works. Takes at least 20 seconds to launch on first instance, but once running gets along just fine.

Windows Live Messenger

Works, but because the client is so big on graphics that there are stutters/pauses.

Yahoo! Messenger

Works, but also chunky on memory resources.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Works, no issues.

Picasa

Works, but you will run into screen resolution issues.

Any mapping web site (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Mapquest, Bing Maps)

Works but you are guaranteed to run into screen resolution issues. Highly suggested that you only use these when the browser is in full-screen mode.

Got a question if an app will work or not?

Ask away. Post a comment below.