Tuesday December 8
 
11:50
 
New Netbook

Back in May 2007 I bought one of the first so-called “Netbooks”, the Kohjinsha SA1. It had an 800×600 swivel inaccurate touchscreen and ran like a dog – and I don’t mean a greyhound, I mean one of those small fat wobbly dogs that pensioners have.

It cost 104,800 yen. It was probably one of the most disappointing PC purchases I ever bought. The keyboard was worse than that of a ZX Spectrum. IE ran so slow that it was almost going backwards.

A month after I bought it, Kohjinsha brought out a new model. Same price. Higher res screen. Decent keyboard. New processor. All the problems fixed. Grrrr.

Fastforward to 2009 and it’s fair to say that I’m still cautious of Netbooks. One bitten, twice shy they say.

But Netbooks really have come on by leaps and bounds. Last week I bought one of the new Acer Aspire One AOD250 netbooks. Looks wise, it’s just like this – but with it has the new N280 processor and a 1280×720 screen. With the larger screen, it doesn’t feel constrained like a 1024×600 netbook. Battery life is around 7 hours – in the week that I’ve had it, using it for about an hour on the sofa each night, I’ve not yet had to recharge it once.

Good keyboard, large screen, useable battery life, and very decent speed running Chrome, it is perfectly usable – unlike the Kohjinsha trash I bought before. And it only cost 35,760 yen – almost 70,000 less than the crap I bought before.

The only problem? It has two screen defects – one single RGB gone at the top left, and one full RGB set, a full pixel, at the bottom left.

Usually dead pixels would bother the hell out of me – but with the pitch on the 1280×720 screen being so small, I can’t notice the single RGB defect and can only notice the full dead pixel if I look for it. I started the process of sending it back to exchange it, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered. If it was a bright always-on pixel then I’d care more. If I’d bought a 110,000 yen MacBook then I’d care. But on a cheap-as-chips netbook that has a life of 1-2 year max? It’s not worth my time getting a new one, running the risk that it has bright pixel defects, setting up Windows 7 again, etc etc.  Yeah, I’d prefer it was perfect, but I guess they have low tolerances on these cheapo computers. And the price on Amazon has gone up now by around 10%, so I kinda got it at a discount.

Bottom line: Netbooks can actually handle internet use now, which is splendid – and they are almost at throwaway prices.

For what it’s worth, I’ve read that Acer’s screen policy is 8-16 dead/bright “spots” across the whole screen or one in centerbefore they’ll consider a return. Whether spot means “RGB” value or “pixel”, I’m not quite sure.

One of the nice things about this new Netbook is that it came with Windows 7 Starter. Why is that nice? I have an MSDN subscription and I was able to enter my Ultimate serial number into the “Upgrade Anytime” control panel and Windows immediately upgraded the installation to Ultimate, without needing to download anything. I then downloaded the English language pack and could switch the UI to English – dumping the Japanese. OK, so it isn’t as easy as having a Mac and it requires Ultimate, but it’s better than having to install Windows again from scratch.