On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:19:20AM -0400, J 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.
Once again, with the Acer, it's major surgery--did I mention that to
upgrade ram, you have to take the rubber feet of the bottom, which are
attached with some sort of doublesided tape.
I don't know if they fixed this on later models, however, it was a major
complaint on the AA1 forums when I frequented them--the difficulty of
doing any altherations that involved getting into the machine's
internals. So, unless she's willing to pay someone to do that, (and
even if her guy friend is a geek, it might stump him--shucks, I took one
look at what was involved and said the heck with it), I'd say that's
not, in this case, with this model, a convenient option.
> . Extra RAM would also be nice...
See above--even that is major surgery.
>
> 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.
This is another things about the Asus--very easy to replace RAM.
>
> 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.
Heh--hrrm, memory blurs, but yes, for that model, it does seem rather
high--when I bought, I think it was much less, especially for the 512MB,
8GB SSD, Linux model.
>
> 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.
Asus--with 7' screens, I think.
> 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 own opinion is that if she's willing to go through the long upgrade
of Ubuntu, despite the quality of folks they hire for QA <cough cough>,
it is definitely usable.
> 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.
The theory at the time was that they were less vulnerable to vibration.
>
--
Scott Robbins
PGP keyID EB3467D6
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gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6
Xander: Okay, this is starting to grate my cheese. These
woods aren't that big. Now, I know we've beein going straight because
I've been following the North Star.
Willow: Xander, that's not the North Star. It's an airplane.
Xander: No, that's not an airplane. That's definitely..
can see how one would make that airplane mistake.
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