On subnotebooks

Posted on | May 4, 2009 | Comments Off

Sometime around mid-March, I was in the market for a subnotebook of some kind. My existing laptop – a swivel-screened Toshiba known as Touchstone – is a bit bulky for day to day carrying, plus it was second hand when I got it, and every single netbook on the market blows it out of the water for specs.

A number of people I know have Asus Eee netbooks, but I’m not fond of them, mostly because the 80% of full size keyboard is a little too small for me to use comfortably (The 1000 model has a 92% keyboard, which is better), but also I’m not that fond of how the machines actually look. Mac user, remember.

Eventually I went for the Compaq Mini 700 (which is a variation of the popular HP Mini 1000, sold only in the states) because it has a 92% keyboard, looks nice, and was being given away free with a 3 3G mobile broadband contract.

I had it just over a week before it – along with my bag, iphone, keys, wallet etc – were stolen, but for that week it was a really nice laptop.

This week I got around to replacing it, and after careful and due consideration I got exactly the same model. It still doesn’t have a solid state hard-drive, but makes up for this by having a decent amount of space. It arrived Thursday morning, and first thing I did was to put the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. 

I’m not a great fan of the Netbook Remix interface, prefering a more standard Gnome setup (though stripped down a great deal), though I’ve kept the addition that automatically maximizes all the windows. 

Sound was broken by default, but that’s a known thing, and a kernel linked from that thread fixed it.

So now I have a netbook, can get online from anywhere (once I replace the 3G modem) and have no excuse not to update this.

Oh yes.

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