Quote:Original post by capn_midnight

Quote:Original post by davepermen

Quote:Original post by capn_midnight
I've been thinking about buying a couple of these, some USB hard drives, and using them as servers around the house.

www.mini-box.com has the M200 and M300 which i use for servers (and cheap workstations).

i don't think you can get new hw for less than that (<200$ depending on config).

Holy crap those are awesome.

You might also be interested in the Buffalo Kurobox, which can be had for $160 or less.

I use a 17" laptop as my primary computer. It's wonderful. A Dell E1705. (4 years old). I'd recommend if your going to be programming just buy a nice 17" laptop that you can carry around and such.

You can get dual 9800 graphics cards in one so you should be fine. I don't upgrade computers so it works out well. If you're one of those people that runs out to grab the newest video card and newest processor and such then a laptop might not be for you.

Quote:I wonder if you guys buy and install Windows or use the usually pre-installed Linux.

I'm using Windows 7 on mine. I think not many of them come with Linux nowadays; the trend is toward Windows XP. I think Microsoft made it quite cheap for them to do that a while ago (like $30 or so).

The keyboards vary quite a bit from one netbook to another. My 10" is big for a netbook and the keyboard size and quality is great. Obviously a 7" one will be tougher to type on, and 9" ones might be uncomfortable for some. Even within the same size class (like 9"), keyboard sizes can vary a fair bit.

Quote:There is just something about going all the way down to such a tiny screen that just makes shrug my shoulders and accept the small screen space, where as when I just simply drop one of my 17"crts to use a single 18" LCD, I'm always looking around for more space. With the small screen I accept that I can't have everything open at once and I don't mind anymore.

I agree with that. On my desktop, 24" is finally big enough that I feel comfortable with the size. A laptop or 17-19" LCD seems too small to me and I've always complained to friends that I wouldn't want a laptop partially because the screen is too small. But surprisingly, I've had few issues with the netbook resolution.

I use an ASUS 1000he for scientific work and as my sole home computer. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and removed Windows in favor of Fedora 11 beta with a KDE desktop. I honestly didn't notice the keyboard was any smaller than the one I use in the office (a desktop machine). It did take me a bit to get used to the flat "chiclet" keys, but it wasn't a hard transition. I do usually use a track ball instead of the track pad, but, as far as track pads go, the one on the 1000he is fine, I just don't like track pads. As far as build construction and heat, it feels as solid as any laptop I've used and is one of the few I've used that doesn't cook my nethers.

For me, the size is perfect. I wouldn't want to go any smaller (e.g. on of the 8.9" screens) for my main computer (both due to screen size and keyboard size). At the same time, I find that even a 13" laptop is big enough to make me think twice about porting it around. Basically, if I decided I needed a bigger screen, I wouldn't have bought a laptop (though you can always hook up another screen to the VGA port).

But, as a warning, like Talroth, I went in expecting to change my work flow. Since vertical space is more precious than horizontal on the 1024x600 screen, I moved the taskbar, etc. to the left hand side of the screen. I split it into menu/launchers/taskbar on the top and system tray/clock on the bottom with a gap between them which I use to switch desktops (mouse wheel on desktop switches desktops, although the two-finger gesture on the touch pad is a bit sensitive). I often end up with music on one desktop, notes and documentation on a second, one for coding, and another for general browsing and extra workspace, documentation, notes, whatever. I also find myself using translucent terminals to read documentation underneath while I'm working with the terminal. And, I think it's worth pointing out that I find that some of these habits are actually improvements and I use them even on my office machine.

The main regression I've had to deal with is mostly working with maximized windows. I also trim down applications to only show the most vital information. This is perhaps the biggest pain for me when coding, in that I end up dedicating most of the screen space to the code itself at the expense of other useful information about the code.

I'll also say to be careful about how much power you need from your machine. This is another sacrifice I was willing to make, but, depending on what you want to do with it, it may not be feasible for you. Don't get me wrong, netbooks can be surprisingly powerful. I run KDE with some compositing effects (in particular translucency and the desktop cube) and haven't noticed any problems with that, even though I was a little hesitant from all the suggestions to use XFCE or LXDE I'd seen (I wonder if they even tried KDE on it). I don't like wobbly windows, but, so you know, they don't always run smoothly (but much more smoothly in KDE 4.2 than earlier in the 4.x series). The only game I've tried besides the card games is Deus Ex, which runs fine in Wine with software rendering, but gets a little jerky when I try to use OpenGL.

So, in my experience, it takes some sacrifice and a willingness to change, but I find that it's more than made up for by the fact that I actually use it.