Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Still Sticking with the Acer C110

I'm itching to get a new computer, specifically a netbook especially after everytime I read a review of the latest devices. James Kendrick just posted a review of the new HP Mini 1000 and Laptop magazine reviewed the Samsung NC10. As a reader of this blog you know that I am using my Acer C110 which I have had for 4 years now and is actually 5 years old since I bought it refurbished. Even with sub $500 prices I will keep using the Acer. While it would be nice to have a built in cam, bluetooth, a better screen and much better battery life, the deal breaker is the screen size. My 10" screen on the Acer is larger than the wide screen 10" displays on the Samsung and HP. My resolution is set to 1024 x 768 while the others have a 1024 x 600. That makes my Acer 28% longer. The loss of this screen real estate was made clear to me while I was watching the Laptop video of the NC10. With the tool bar on the top of the browser there wasn't much web page to see.

Perhaps one day a netbook will come out with the larger screen, I can only hope!

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Is My Acer C110 a Netbook?

Netbooks seem to be the rage with bloggers these days from Kevin Tofel loving his MSI Wind to Chippy having concerns about Netbooks. I actually thought about upgrading and getting the new Samsung NC10 netbook but then I thought, isn't my upgraded Acer a Netbook? Netbooks are supposed to be suited for web browsing, email and other low processing intensive tasks such as word processing and spreadsheets. These are basically the things I do with my Acer. Also, these devices are meant to be small and mobile, similar to my Acer. So lets see how my Acer stacks up with the Samsung NC10.

Acer Samsung
Weight 3 lbs 2.8 lbs
Screen 10" 10"
OS XP Tablet XP
Processsor Intel Pentium M .9 GHz Intel Atom 1.6GHz
RAM 1 GB 1 GB
HDD 160 GB 160 GB
Wireless WIFI rev G WIFI rev G and Bluetooth
Battery Life 2 hours 5 hours

As you can see from these key specs, the Acer is very similar in size, form and function. However, it would be nice to have bluetooth as I do have some bluetooth devices (headset and gps receiver). It would also be very nice to have the 6 cell battery which some claim will last 8 hours but others think it would only be 5+. But I'll take the 5+ over my sub 2 hours with the Acer.

But the best part may be the sub $500 price tag. I paid about $1200 for the Acer in 2004 and it was refurbished and that only included a 40 GB disk drive! But of course the Acer is a convertible Tablet; no inking with the Samsung!

For now I will stay with the 4+ year old Acer which is working fine for my needs. But its nice to see that when I do need to get a new laptop, I can get one that meets my needs for less than $500.