Mini-laptops

[Spin Echo]

My current laptop is reaching the end of its life, so I'm looking a replacement for it. I'm looking mainly for something small I can carry around me for checking the web, email, writing and a bit of light data analysis. I don't tend to play video games and I'm not expecting I'll be running any heavy duty software on it. If I'm going to be doing any major number crunching, that will be on my work PC. One of the things that have caught my eye is the mini laptops.

Do people have any experience and opinions on them? Of the lot, I think I'm liking the Acer Aspire One the best.

[Bounty]

I don't know much about specific brands, but if you plan on using this laptop intensively, please do try it out in a store first. I've used one of those itty-bitty mini laptops once - the one where the hinge is almost bigger than the screen, a Belinea? - and there's just no way you can type on it for any length of time in anything resembling comfort. Small laptops might look good on paper, but in practice I'd happily trade some size for ergonomics.

EDIT: I think it was this one.

[Seggybop]

These things are small and light and have good battery life, but they're really weak. You said you weren't going to be doing anything strenuous, but it's surprising how little it takes to choke up an Atom CPU or how constricting these tiny screens are. I recommend checking ebay, craigslist, or your local equivalent for used small laptops of similar dimensions. A laptop from a few years ago will crush any of these new machines as far as speed goes and it'll have a higher resolution screen without a huge border area, at the cost of some weight and battery life.

[JointStrikeFighter]

I use an EEE PC 900 model and its great.

[Starglider]

I recommend checking ebay, craigslist, or your local equivalent for used small laptops of similar dimensions. A laptop from a few years ago will crush any of these new machines as far as speed goes and it'll have a higher resolution screen without a huge border area, at the cost of some weight and battery life.

I am heavy eBay purchaser and used to buy lots of second hand PCs (when I was a student, to make a cheap research cluster). I do recommend second hand purchasing as a viable option for people who need a cheap desktop (particularly if they want to play moderate games; hardcore gamers who absolutely must change their whole computer every six months put a lot of decent stuff on eBay).

However I'd be really careful about buying a second hand laptop. They have a statistically much shorter lifespan than desktops and a higher chance of randomly dying - and when that does happen, odds are you can't fix them with a simple $20 part. Laptops can have casing cracks ready to give way and split the screen off, they can have batteries that have lost all their ability to hold charge and they're more likely to have fans jammed up with dirt, sticking keyboards and/or screen damage. Yes you might get lucky and get one that's been well cared for and good for another five years, but the odds are much worse than for a desktop.

[phongn]

Do people have any experience and opinions on them? Of the lot, I think I'm liking the Acer Aspire One the best.

The Aspire One is pretty good, and I've heard good things about the Samsung NC10. Toss in an upgrade to 2GB of RAM and it should be more than oomph for office and web surfing.

However I'd be really careful about buying a second hand laptop. They have a statistically much shorter lifespan than desktops and a higher chance of randomly dying - and when that does happen, odds are you can't fix them with a simple $20 part. Laptops can have casing cracks ready to give way and split the screen off, they can have batteries that have lost all their ability to hold charge and they're more likely to have fans jammed up with dirt, sticking keyboards and/or screen damage. Yes you might get lucky and get one that's been well cared for and good for another five years, but the odds are much worse than for a desktop.

A used IBM/Lenovo X-series would probably be a better bet for used.

[General Zod]

I got to play around with a netbook a few weeks ago, and pretty much my biggest gripe is the keyboard. If you plan on doing any sort of extensive typing whatsoever it's horribly uncomfortable to use for extended periods of time.

[Starglider]

I got to play around with a netbook a few weeks ago, and pretty much my biggest gripe is the keyboard. If you plan on doing any sort of extensive typing whatsoever it's horribly uncomfortable to use for extended periods of time.

If you mainly use it in a home or office then plugging a full-size wireless keyboard into it should be quite practical. That's what my parents do when they want to word process on their laptop. I imagine you'd want one with an integrated touchpad.

[General Zod]

If you mainly use it in a home or office then plugging a full-size wireless keyboard into it should be quite practical. That's what my parents do when they want to word process on their laptop. I imagine you'd want one with an integrated touchpad.

Personally, if I were going to get a laptop for mostly home or office use I wouldn't waste money on a netbook, I'd get something with a full keyboard already. Since otherwise that defeats the point of having one, which is to be light and portable for traveling.

[Starglider]

Personally, if I were going to get a laptop for mostly home or office use I wouldn't waste money on a netbook, I'd get something with a full keyboard already.

Personally I agree with you, but some people really like being able to carry it around from room to room. Certainly my parents do. To be fair they write a few pages of letters and emails a week, whereas I spend something like twelve hours a day typing into assorted computers.

Since otherwise that defeats the point of having one, which is to be light and portable for traveling.

Light? Portable? Speak for yourself Personally I just ordered one of these; 3.5 Ghz overclocked quad core, 80G SSD, 17" screen, 4.5kg not including spare battery, psu or hard case. But then I've been meaning to increase the amount of upper body exercise I do.

[General Zod]

Personally I agree with you, but some people really like being able to carry it around from room to room. Certainly my parents do. To be fair they write a few pages of letters and emails a week, whereas I spend something like twelve hours a day typing into assorted computers.

If all you're doing is carrying it from room to room, then it still doesn't need to be a tiny netbook. It's not as if regular notebooks are impossible to lug around or anything.

Light? Portable? Speak for yourself Personally I just ordered one of these; 3.5 Ghz overclocked quad core, 80G SSD, 17" screen, 4.5kg not including spare battery, psu or hard case. But then I've been meaning to increase the amount of upper body exercise I do.

Obviously I was talking about having a netbook, not a notebook in general. (Also, SSDs are a bit of a waste if you're wanting performance, they're still largely too slow to be practical).

[Count Chocula]

Writing and light number crunching implies an office suite, OpenOffice or MS. I'd recommend a small-display laptop, like this one from Dell.

Otherwise, I'd recommend a Treo PDA with a Bluetooth keyboard if you can work with the small screen.

[Big Phil]

I don't really get the point of paying as much as (sometimes more) you would for a full-size, fully capable laptop, just to get something smaller and lighter (and substantially less capable). $549 for an Inspiron Mini 12 is the same as I paid earlier this year for a Dell Inspiron 1521, which came with a much larger screen, 4x the hard drive capacity, a more powerful processor, a machine capable of games/videos/photo editing, and a basic office functionality suite (Microsoft Works). The only difference is size (my Inspiron 1521 has a 15" screen and weighs 5 or 6 pounds, vs. a 12" screen and 2-3 pounds), and I don't think a smaller keyboard/screen/lighter weight/reduced functionality is worth the cost.

[Starglider]

If all you're doing is carrying it from room to room, then it still doesn't need to be a tiny netbook.

You'd think so, but some people (women in particular) seem to have this bizarre desire for smaller technology even though it just makes it harder to use. Even my wife does this; she keeps declaring all my stuff 'far too big' for no apparent reason.

(Also, SSDs are a bit of a waste if you're wanting performance, they're still largely too slow to be practical).

That was true until very recently, but no longer. The new Intel drives easily beat a WD Velociraptor (the state of the art in desktop HDs) in all real world benchmarks. Of course I also included a conventional 400G drive for backup and media files (it should stay spun down most of the time when I'm using this beast).

[General Zod]

That was true until very recently, but no longer. The new Intel drives easily beat a WD Velociraptor (the state of the art in desktop HDs) in all real world benchmarks. Of course I also included a conventional 400G drive for backup and media files (it should stay spun down most of the time when I'm using this beast).

I'm talking more cost/performance ratio than just raw performance. For what you pay for an 80gb ssd drive I can easily purchase a conventional 320gb 7200rpm hdd in a laptop for far less than half the cost.

[Starglider]

I'm talking more cost/performance ratio than just raw performance. For what you pay for an 80gb ssd drive I can easily purchase a conventional 320gb 7200rpm hdd in a laptop for far less than half the cost.

Oh absolutely, they suck for cost/performance. But if I cared about that I wouldn't have spent $4000 on a overclocked quad-core laptop would I?

I specifically wanted an SSD because of the very low latency. It isn't really practical to put more than 4Gb of memory in a laptop at the moment (8Gb is possible but it's another $2000ish), so when I do a demo using a large database it will inevitably page, and since the algorithms we use are fairly random-access in the way they hit the database latency is critical to performance (though the large sustained read speed improvement is nice too).

[General Zod]

Oh absolutely, they suck for cost/performance. But if I cared about that I wouldn't have spent $4000 on a overclocked quad-core laptop would I?

I specifically wanted an SSD because of the very low latency. It isn't really practical to put more than 4Gb of memory in a laptop at the moment (8Gb is possible but it's another $2000ish), so when I do a demo using a large database it will inevitably page, and since the algorithms we use are fairly random-access in the way they hit the database latency is critical to performance (though the large sustained read speed improvement is nice too).

I suppose they have certain limited commercial applications, but recommending them over traditional drives for the average user is silly.

[Starglider]

I suppose they have certain limited commercial applications, but recommending them over traditional drives for the average user is silly.

I haven't seen anyone doing that, though I wouldn't put it past on-commission salespeople at PC World or similar. The one major advantage of SSDs for light users is that they use a lot less power - not relevant for me but if you're trying to get a whole day's battery life out of your MacBook Air or similar it might be relevant.

Of course prices will continue to fall and capacities increase rapidly. Current SSD purchasers are early adpoters; give it two or three more years and they will have displaced HDs in laptop applications (desktops might take a little longer).

[phongn]

That was true until very recently, but no longer. The new Intel drives easily beat a WD Velociraptor (the state of the art in desktop HDs) in all real world benchmarks. Of course I also included a conventional 400G drive for backup and media files (it should stay spun down most of the time when I'm using this beast).

Intel has an even faster version of that drive out now, with even more amazing performance

Light? Portable? Speak for yourself Personally I just ordered one of these; 3.5 Ghz overclocked quad core, 80G SSD, 17" screen, 4.5kg not including spare battery, psu or hard case. But then I've been meaning to increase the amount of upper body exercise I do.

And here I thought the ThinkPad W700 was excessive!

[Starglider]

Intel has an even faster version of that drive out now, with even more amazing performance

That's the enterprise version, but unfortunately it's even more expensive for just 32Gb. You can easily put that much memory in a server these days, so the only thing I'd find it useful for is database write logging. But when the density to gets up to 128Gb plus, I'm definitely getting some for our compute servers.

[Laird]

I have a pair of Dell Mini 9's, I can honestly say they have been great so far and can play several PC games. If you go the Dell route make sure to get the mini 9(you can do upgrades yourself, on the later mini's the access hatches are not removable.)

[Vain]

I am a big fan of ultralight laptops, actually. I have an older model Toshiba Portege running Windows XP and a MacBook Air running Leopard. I favor the small form factor and lightweight machines, because they're more convenient for me to carry and use. I don't need any sort of heavy iron for the vast majority of the work that I do; what I need is a terminal that I can take into a wiring closet or IT sanctuary and easily hold in one hand.

In the rare instances when I do need a portable machine with real guts in it, I have found that something like a homebrew Shuttle fulfills my needs for a fraction of the cost of a suitably high-performance laptop. Granted, I have to carry some sort of display with me, but if I'm demoing something, I generally expect to be plugged into a projector anyway, whether I'm using a laptop or not. It rarely amounts to any real additional hassle.

[Edi]

What kind of net connection do you intend to use that thing with, Spin Echo? If a normal cable or WLAN, it's all the same. If you intend to use the GSM/3G based solutions common at least here, you need to check that the laptop, whether mini or not, is compatible with the hardware. For example, the Huawei E169 and E220 3G devices running the Mobile Partner software just do not work on most Acer machines. Especially the Acer Aspire One.

The eeePC has Open Office on the Linux version and it's light enough, but I wouldn't want to write a lot on it (or on any laptop, even a large one), but your mileage may vary.

[Ypoknons]

I use a eeePC 1000H on a regular basis. My key tips are:

1) Make sure you can type comfortably on the keyboard. eeePC 900-series could be a bit tight.
2) Try to get a 6-cell battery. These things are a lot handier when they have 4-5 hours of battery life instead.

The thing which bugs me is that they can't 720p and up video, but the new N10 can since it has graphics card (9300M) assist. The form factor is nasty though, too similar to the old 1000H.