ASUS Eee - deal you may know of

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:09:15AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Others have pointed out that hard drive replacement is easy (at least
> for them) and not too expensive.  I would tend to agree, with caveats:
> 
> (1) some people are more confident whacking on hardware than others,
> 
> (2) some notebooks are really hard to upgrade (eg. my subnotebook
> required a lot of disassembly just to get to the RAM).

I have had to remove the keyboard on a laptop to get at the ram.  Very
stupid design (Thanks HP/Compaq consumer division).  I have not (yet)
seen a laptop where the harddisk was hard to get at.  I suspect if I saw
a Macbook Air I might have seen one (which also has no ethernet jack,
which is just totally stupid).

> I don't remember the specs of your notebook.  If you've outgrown it or
> it is wildly obsolete it might not be worth fixing.
> 
> Be sure that you have a good backup if you hope to install Windows on
> the new hard disk.  If you don't care about your current data and
> Windows then installing a new disk is easier.
> 
> Don't put off backing up your data: the life of a failing hard disk is
> quite precarious.

If your data isn't backed up, then it isn't important.  Being a sysadmin
in the past tought me that.  Much easier to deal with people's disk
failures and such if that is your policy.  If someone complains that
their floppy with their only copy of their document doesn't work, well
then it wasn't an important document after all.

> It depends on how you intend to use the computer.
> 
> As a general purpose computer, netbooks are fairly limited.  The
> keyboards and displays in particular are limited.  No optical drive.
> The ones with solid-state disks are quite limited in disk capacity.
> They are really great (I imagine) for carrying around for quick access
> to the internet.
> 
> If you want a general-purpose computer, there are quite a few deals
> for low-end conventional notebooks in the $400 to $500 range.  Much
> more bang for your buck (and kilos for your buck) than netbooks.
> 
> I don't know how you would use your computer so I don't know if a
> netbook would actually suit you or not.
> 
> As for netbook deals: they come and go.  For example, last Friday,
> Staples was selling an Acer Aspire One for $300.  This Friday, in the
> US ("Black Friday"), Dell will be selling its netbook for $300.
> Finding a deal requires figuring out what you want (some keyboards are
> nicer than others, does Blue Tooth matter?, battery sizes differ, SSD
> or hard drive?,...)  and then awaiting a deal to come up.  eSng and PC
> Village have had sometimes had good sale prices.

Some have better linux support than others.  Some have better specs.
Some have better build quality and warrenty and such.

-- 
Len SOrensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists