Maxwell Thelen

I am now finished with my military training at the Signal School in Fort Gordon, Ga.  I am headed up to Virginia Beach where I will start law school this fall at Regent.  I have had my netbook for almost six months now so I thought I would take some time to write some opinions about it.

Overall, it has been great.   I have to say that bar-none the best feature is the near 9 hour battery life.  It has been consistently that long-lasting and in the time I spent as a busy student of Army IT it was indispensable.  Having Windows XP on it was a must though.  I love a good distro of linux same as any other person, but working for the Army dictates a Microsoft OS.  As stubborn as I am, demanding that Raytheon, Harris and Thales make drivers for their Mil-spec Radio Programming Utilities that work with Linux doesn’t get the radios working today when your troops need them. Having a 160GB hard drive has been a relief with the amount of data I collected from class to class and so far I have had no problems that makes me wish I had a solid state drive, and that is even after dragging it around from TOC to TAC and back.

The 95% chiclet keyboard has proven easy to adjust to even with my big fingers. Wireless is rock solid, Atom processor holds its own, put a 2GB chip of RAM in for $20 and it is more than enough for opening every MS Office app I use and a browser, sd card reader is nice, 3 usb ports are great.

One downside is the lack of an optical drive for Army use, not to complain, afterall that is practically what makes it a netbook, but from the perspective of an ultramobile pc comparison, per se.  For law school I don’t perceive it to even be a consideration, but with the Army banning USB sticks because of some sloppy property accountability in DC and the sandbox the ability to use CD media is a must.  I got a $50 Samsung external drive that works like a charm and fits nicely in the same neoprene slip as the laptop – not bad. I carried it around when doing Army schools, but figure I can leave it at home for Torts and Civil Procedure.

The last thing I would like to touch on is screen size.  Yeah, it’s a netbook, it’s 10in of 1024×600.  Is that a con? No, not really. its plenty big enough for MS Office, email and browsing and all the other little apps I use.  It is a little irritating to use Google Chat inside of Gmail because I have 20 people in my list and that drags off the bottom of the screen so I started using the Google Chat client and just checking my mail in Gmail, problem solved for when I am in the classroom.  When I am at home, another of this netbook’s strong points is revealed, its little VGA out with it’s intel driver will do high resolutions in the 1920×1080 range if your external display supports it.  So as cheap as LCDs are these days its easy to plug in a VGA cable and have 21in or more of workspace all running smoothly from this thing.  If you have a monitor that is worth its VoltAmps then you can just leave its DVI port plugged into your desktop and switch input to the VGA to organize all your Onenote notes from class that day on your netbook.

In summary, It’s been great for class and I haven’t missed the optical drive in normal use.  In class I love the small screen and great battery life.  At home I like to hook it up to a monitor for a little more workspace.  I would buy it again, definitely worth $400 and all I really need day to day.

-Max