Blowing Down the Competition

Those of you that have been following my tweets will already know that I recently bought what is called a “netbook”. A netbook is a laptop that is normally lighter in weight and smaller in size. I ordered from Best Buy the “MSI Wind U100″. After much research I found that this netbook was the right one for me. I absolutely love the idea of these tiny laptops because they express the idea that the laptop should be mobile. Some of these laptops can reach as big as 17 inches and who would ever want to carry around a pizza box size computer! lol Anyways there are several reasons why I decided to buy these particular netbook.

First off I’ve tested out several different sizes in the stores. Anywhere from 8 inches to 10 inches. It is nice to have a small laptop but the netbooks that were 8 and 9 inches I found extremely difficult to type on. Some of the Asus EEE PCs had these tiny keyboards and I found them not as productive as some others. But if you are buying a netbook for someone with smaller hands or perhaps a child then they might be compelling towards your cause. But for me I needed a decent size keyboard.

Second reason had to do also with the size. Obviously the smaller the netbook the smaller the screen is. Now thankfully God has blessed me with good eyes and I am young so my eye sight is better than some, but I still think 8 or 9 inches is sort of tiny for a screen. I want to preserve my good eye sight as long as possible. Also the smaller the screen the less productive you can be. Lets say if I wanted to have several applications opened at once then I would constantly have to switch windows. I like the option of staying mobile but maintaining screen real estate.

The MSI Wind U100 also had a decent amount of features that may not appeal to everyone but for enthusiasts I think it may spark your attention. First off with my Mac I have an iSight camera and since I will be traveling again this summer I decided my netbook had to have a built-in web-camera. The camera on this netbook is not as good as my iSight camera on the Mac but the price difference was quite noticeable. So after installing Skye on my MSI Wind I can now video chat with my family when I travel.

Another feature I was fond of was the fact that I could upgrade the memory (RAM) on this particular model. If you look around a lot of the netbooks only come with one gigabyte of RAM installed. Depending on the manufacture and model of your netbook, you might not even be able to add additional memory. The U100 allowed me to install up to two gigabytes of memory. I think this is important because it will add a more positive experience to using your netbook. *Also please note, not all MSI Netbooks allow you to upgrade the RAM, please make sure before you purchase it, if this is a feature you are interested in*.

The final reason I bought this MSI Wind is because driver wise (a driver is just a plug-in that allows the software to correspond with the physical devices in the computer) has the ability to run Windows 7 beta, Ubuntu, as well as Mac OS X! Being a Unix user I was quite excited about this. I will not show you how to get Mac OS X to run on your Wind but it is possible. Just Google what is called a Hackintosh. After a little tweaking you can have yourself a $300 Mac laptop. I have a Mac so I did not perform this attempt. *There are also some supposed legalities to attempting this process*. Anyways I have installed a new netbook distro of Ubuntu on my machine and it is running beautifully. My wifi, webcam, everything works with a fresh install of Jaunty Ubuntu 9. Those of you who are open source users will know what I am talking about. Anyways Ubuntu or Linux is faster than Windows XP (which is what came installed) or even Windows 7. I have been very impressed and I encourage everyone with this particular netbook to at least try it out. Ubuntu is absolutely free and is more reliable in some cases than Windows.

Anyways thanks for reading!

Best Buy
Wikipedia Entry on Netbooks
Mico Star
Jaunty Linux Distro