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..
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
No comments:
Post a Comment