Netbook

I just purchased one of these ultra light sub-notebooks people call “netbooks.” My primary reason is so I can carry it everywhere, write, check email and surf the web. My other reason: they’re just so dang cool.

I do have a perfectly good 15-inch laptop, but it weighs close to 7 pounds, and with power supply and other gear ends up feeling like 25 pound of stuff to lug around. And it’s big. And loud.

This netbook, the Dell Insprion 910 (a.k.a the Mini 9) weighs 2.2 pounds, just a tad more with its tiny power supply (which I rarely need). It has a dinky solid state hard drive 16 GB, but I’m not running any power apps or games, so that’s fine. I have an 8 GB SDHC card thrown in for movies and such.

There were plenty of other contenders, the Acer Aspire One and the Asus PC EEE 10 with bigger HDs, noisy fans, and slightly larger keyboards, but both with other issues that made the Dell the pick for me.

Speaking of fans, the Dell doesn’t have one. It has no moving parts and is utterly silent. It’s weird to work on a computer that doesn’t make any noise. I like it a lot. Zen almost.

The keyboard is 86% of normal size. Dell has made compromises like no dedicated F Keys (the function keys are in the center row as alternates). It works great for me. The other netbooks had a little flex to their keyboards, which would have driven me nuts. This Dell keyboarded is rock solid. One caveat: I have small hands, so you will definitely want to try one out if you’re going to buy.

Last, all these netbooks are fairly cheap: $300-500.

Let me know if you guys use a sub notebook or one of these newer netbooks. I’d love to compare notes.

There are more pics up on my facebook account (becuase blogger is not playing well with others today).

I’ll report back after I’ve written ten thousand words or so on it….