Roy
On 26 March 2010 10:19, J <dreadpiratejeff@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Wow... seems to have been a busy morning. I'm just hung over a bit
> after meeting up with a friend of mine from Red Hat last night while
> he was in town...
>
> So I'm going to try to jump in and summarise a bit and add my own
> comments from several e-mails, rather than respond to them one at a
> time...
>
> Sharon,
>
> Since you aren't afraid to install something different, but need some
> hand holding, as Scott said, no problem!
>
> Honestly, I don't see, off hand, a problem with the netbook you have,
> other than that SSD drive. I've got no experience with them
> personally (of that vintage at least, IIRC, that Acer is actually
> about 3 years old or so) so take this with a grain of salt.
>
> Depending on what kind of drive it's using, and given that it's SSD,
> I'm assuming SATA, you can actually replace it with any laptop drive
> of the same connector type. I have a Lenovo S-10 netbook that has a
> 160GB SATA drive, and I also have a little 16GB SanDisk SSD drive that
> I swap in and out for testing.
>
> Depending on how much you can afford to, or want to spend, you can
> replace that apparently very slow, tiny SSD drive with a much faster
> one in a much larger size, and probably be pretty happy with the
> performance. Extra RAM would also be nice... the Atom is a low
> performance processor (at least when compared to laptops that come
> with the newer dual core or quad core processors) but it's very good
> for what it does, IMHO.
>
> My Lenovo came with 1GB RAM (512MB onboard and 512MB extra). The very
> first thing I did was replace that 512MB SODIMM with a 1GB one, giving
> me 1.5GB of RAM, which was a slight improvement, but noticeable.
>
> I believe you mentioned it was $390? That is a bit high, IMHO,
> especially coming from Tiger Direct... Though, since it was from
> Tiger Direct, that also kinda explains how you ended up with that one
> so fairly recently.
>
> Regarding Firefox 2.0. As Robert mentioned, unsupported does not mean
> unusable. For what it's worth, until very recently, like within the
> last month, my desktop system ran RHEL 4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4)
> and had Firefox 2.x. I just recently reinstalled it with Ubuntu 9.10,
> but for a very long time, I was perfectly happy with Firefox 2.x (by
> the way, 2.x refers to the entire Firefox 2 line, so FF 2.0, 2.1, 2.4,
> etc.)
>
> I can also understand your frustration with Acer, but honestly, IMHO,
> netbooks ARE meant to be disposable devices. They are cheap, and fit
> a niche market that simply exploded like no one thought possible.
> When Acer, Asus and MSI (I believe they were the first) started
> selling netbooks 3 or 4 years ago, they were simply meant to be cheap
> computers that anyone could buy. Laptops for people who couldn't
> afford, or didn't want to spend ~$1000 on a laptop, or computers for
> kids, so you didn't have to worry about Little Johnny tearing up your
> $2500 MacBook.
>
> No one really expected that they would take off like they did, but
> they did, and so improvements came along VERY quickly, as did many
> other competing models. I can't really think of a computer vendor
> these days that doesn't have a netbook of some sort in their product
> line (except for maybe Apple, unless you can count the iPad as their
> foray, though they DO sell 12" MacBooks).
>
> Anyway, there's no reason to just trash the one you have. From what
> I've read here and there, with the exception that Scott brought up
> about the slow write speed on those drives, they really aren't that
> bad for what they are.
>
> My suggestion, however, as above, would be to put a new hard disk in
> them. You can get them fairly cheap unless you go with another
> solid-state disk. Regular hard disks will run you around $100 for
> roughly 250GB... that's a rough estimate, by the way, but it gives you
> an idea.
>
> Another problem with the solid state drives is that they (and this
> applies to the older ones far more than it does the newer ones) can
> and will suffer from problems far faster than a regular disk. The
> newer ones are a LOT better about lifespans, but I still don't really
> trust them more than I would a regular hard disk.
>
> Joan had also suggested that you try them out before you take on
> installing them... that's an excellent suggestion and is a LOT easier
> than you may think.
>
> You asked about buying a new one... Welcome to Linux. The OS is free,
> as are most apps. But to answer the question which one is an entirely
> different discussion... everyone has their own opinion.
>
> Puppy sounds good, but honestly, I haven't looked at Puppy in a while
> so I don't know what it's like these days. If it tells you anything
> about me, the last time I really looked at Puppy or DSL (Damn Small
> Linux) it was when they were 1.44MB images made to run from a single
> floppy disk. I was looking at using one to build a "web server on a
> CD" as a means to build a secure server appliance.
>
> I would suggest Ubuntu. I'd even go as far as suggesting Ubuntu
> Netbook Remix, or Ubuntu Netbook Edition. They have a different UI
> than most other Linux distributions but in 15 years of using Linux,
> I've never seen a more user friendly distro. Of course, EVERYONE has
> their own opinions on that, and that's just mine, but I tend to use my
> former boss' criteria for usability. "Can my mom..."
>
> Whenever we were testing a distro (History: I worked for IBM for 6
> years testing Red Hat and SuSE Linux) his first questions were "Can my
> mom download this today?" and "If my Mom were going to configure this,
> would it work for her"... And I've shown my own mom all manner of
> Linux distributions, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu, etc.,
> and the only one she could even come close to feeling comfy with was
> Ubuntu.
>
> So, now that I've written this massive post, here's the TL;DR version:
>
> Get a new hard disk. If the 8GB SSD you have is as bad as Scott makes
> it sound, and I do not doubt Scott one bit on this, you'll be MUCH
> happier with a bigger, newer hard drive, AND given the propensity for
> those older drives to fail quickly, you'll be MUCH happier.
>
> Then, get Ubuntu (whether you get Netbook Edition or Desktop Edition)
> and install that.
>
> You'll find that even the install is fairly simple. You boot, pick
> your time zone, keyboard layout and default language. Then you create
> partitions (and if you don't want to attempt that, it'll do it for
> you), enter a user name and password, click install and Bob's your
> uncle.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jeff
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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