[LAU] Time for a new netbook. Advice?

[david]

Netbooks are too slow and small for me, that's why they died out. ;-)

My wife's using a System76 Starling (discontinued). It came with Ubuntu 
Linux installed and everything working out-of-the-box. She gets about 8 
hr battery life out of it.

2012 Consumer Reports book recommends Asus Eee PC 1015PX-MU17-WT (US $280).

I think I saw an Asus on sale at NewEgg.com. Don't know if it was the 
above model. In general, Asus still seems to make the most reliable 
netbooks.

A friend of mine who loves netbooks recommended Toshiba's entry in the 
field (great keyboard) but I think Toshiba discontinued that model a 
while ago. He has Debian or Ubuntu running on all 5 of the netbooks 
(some Toshiba, most Asus Eee PCs) their family uses. He doesn't do pro 
audio, though, so that wouldn't help anything there.

Don't bother with the Chromebook. Slow piece of garbage.

On 09/13/2012 07:47 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Netbooks pretty much died out, replaced by tablets or even
> smartphones. If you're looking for something light-duty and can run
> your apps in the cloud, you might look at a ChromeBook. It has an
> industrial strength Chrome browser, of course, but if you don't have
> readily available broadband or wireless it's pretty much a brick with
> a keyboard. ;-)
>
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 10:33 PM, Ken Restivo<ken at restivo.org>  wrote:
>> It's time to finally retire my 2008-vintage EEE 1000 netbook, and get one with a faster processor and dual cores.
>>
>> I won't need it for music-- the old one was plenty powerful enough for what I was doing anyway-- but I need it for work, and, java runs like an absolute pig on the old EEE (as does Firefox, and Chromium, and just about anything modern).
>>
>> I have come to love the layout of this old EEE though, the keyboard, the form-factor, and its low current consumption (about 1A @12v). So I'd like to keep those as similar as possible. If I could upgrade the processor and RAM and keep everything else, I would.
>>
>> So the EEE 1215N looks pretty good, and if I swap out its spinning-rust-platter drive with a cheap SSD, I can probably get the current consumption down.
>>
>> But I worry. I worry about graphics card not working, wifi not working, sound not working, sleep not working, etc.
>>
>> I looked at the DebianEEE wiki and it seems like not a lot has happened there in years.
>>
>> Any advice on a fast (approaching laptop performance) netbook?
>>
>> -ken


-- 
David
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authenticity, honesty, community
http://clanjones.org/david/
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