ASM Community

I go everywhere with my 17 inch. Do you realize that even with your <12 inch you have to bring a powercord , a mouse and other things. You'll need a bag anyway. My sister has the macbook and it's a decent machine, you might want to check it out.

I have an Acer One 10" that I use when I go to the campus. It currently runs GNU/Linux but originally came with Windows XP Professional SP3. It has an 802.11g wireless card and a bluetooth card. The keyboard is smaller than normal but the keys are interestingly enough, slightly larger than normal (they combined a lot of the keys using the Fn key sequence allowing them optimal use for space). All in all it's a really good system, really light-weight and can easily be carried (open and in use) in the palm of your hand. I get about 3 1/2 hours of actual battery life even though it claims a 4 hour battery, there are upgrade batter packs though, I just use the one which came with it.

There are some downsides... the lack of a CD/DVD drive makes installing software a pain, network installations or converting all of your installs over to USB Flash disk is a good idea but cumbersome. Acer also puts a whole lot of their "Acer Advantage" software on there which really slows everything down and for the most part it could have done without. What makes it worse is, the security settings have you as a user that can't delete the software and you aren't able to reboot into safe mode. The trick to this is to manually edit the BOOT.INI file, reboot the computer into safe mode, remove the acer advantage software and clean up the system how you want, then reset the BOOT.INI file, and reboot back into the standard user. It's a real pain but it's actually kinda cool how the system locks you out of administration to protect you from totally trashing the laptop. Another down-side is if you decide to install Linux the driver support for your wireless card isn't really good and bluetooth support just isn't there at all. For me to use my wireless card, each time I shutdown my laptop I have to make sure I disable the Madwifi driver. Otherwise, on the next reboot the drivers won't be detected. . o ( I should probably script that into the shutdown process... )

But depending on what you are planning on using it for, it's a really good system. I love mine and wouldn't trade it for anything (except maybe another one with a better wireless card). XD

Get a Dell laptop. Maybe an Inspiron Dell laptop. Do NOT buy a Mac laptop. They are unnecessarily expensive. Not that good at all to be honest (unlike some other Macs). Get 2 batteries. One on the laptop and buy an extra battery just in case the first battery dies. Go to dell.com or dell.co.uk and customize the laptop for yourself. Lots of choices there.

thanks for reply
for me i still think there is a big diffrence to carry "big" laptop to a really small one , size does make a difference

i saw "HP Pavilion TX2620EJ CJ981EA" - looks good first look and relative small comparing others
but has a "AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-82" cpu which i don't really familiar with

"Asus Eee PC 1000HE"
"HP Compaq Mini 700EI NG638EA"
saw also two notebook . but does the Atom cpu strong enough?

I saw a commercial for some kind of mini-laptop by verizon? which has XP as OS and probably not a lot of power, but it should be enough to do any kind of surfing easily. It appeared to be about 15x10x2 inches in size...

Ooooh Linux on a laptop, hmmmm. Ouch, argh!!!

Thus the term "consumer electronics" :)