BellaBoo

I'm thinking of getting one but would like some reviews. It wouldn't be taking the place of my full size computer. The Iphone is a little too little for me.

zyxquilts

My friend has one & I got to play on it a bit yesterday. Her's is one of the new Dell mini notebooks. She's using it mostly for school & email. The main drawback is that there is no cd/dvd drive, so in order for her to load MS Word & Excel on, she had to use an external drive that plugs into a USB port. It even came with a teeeeeny little mouse LOL - really, it was only about 2.5 fingers wide!!
It sure seemed to be plenty speedy & she said it has lots of memory. If I had the extra $$$, I would probably get one myself.

amma

I would go to a store and play on for a while....like zyxquilts said, there could be extra expenses to be able to load programs onto it... and I always like to know for myself what it can and cannot do!!! some of the cheaper ones are really "watered down" that they are offering for just under $200 :wink:

BellaBoo

Wordpad is the only word program I'd need to install. It's odd the tiny discs drives aren't being used for these notebook. I saw some online about the size of a half dollar. Soon they will be the size of a dime. The other programs I have installed on my computer are backed up at Carbonite.com so I can download them directly to any computer I own. Super easy. I recommend carbonite or any of the other online back up services. One crash and there goes your pictures, music, files, and programs. There are several sites that will give you up to 2gigs of space free.

tlrnhi

I've been looking at the Acers. I can pick one up here for $499, but the guy says the price will be going down lower after Christmas. I want to use it for our travels and whatnot.
I've played with them and no, they don't have a cd/dvd drive, but a portable one isn't all that much, depending on where you buy it.

BellaBoo

Yeah I bet at Black Friday some will be about $100!

tlrnhi

Maybe, but no way am I going anywhere on Black Friday!

BellaBoo

I love it, if there is something I want. If not I stay far away. :D

Lisanne

I had an Acer Aspire - twice, both times for $300. MS Word 2007 trial version was pre-installed on it. So was McAfee anti-virus software.

The first time, I was traveling. It's wonderful for traveling, because it's very lightweight and fits right into a largish purse.

If you mainly want to get on the web and use Word, it's great. The hard drive is big enough for most software. No, there's no CD/DVD drive, but you can buy an external one or network it to your main computer and install from there, or download from the Internet.

The first one had a bad pixel on its monitor, so I returned it when I got home. Problem was, they'd taken it off the market and I could not get an exchange anywhere. Maybe 8 months later, it showed up again, and I bought it again.

This time I was more aware of its drawbacks. The screen is tiny, so I had to either duck my head down to see it or prop it up on phone books. This meant my hands were up in the air to type on it, which isn't comfortable.

Because the screen is so tiny, the resolution is tiny, too. You can't make the text bigger than a certain size, which is very tiring to my middle-aged eyes.

I finally decided that for another $300, I could have a full-sized laptop. Only, I didn't want Vista, also didn't want the wretched widescreens, so I decided to keep using my desktop and wait for the next version of Windows and hope the manufacturers or style tyrants come to their senses and realize that widescreens are a bad idea for computers. (I don't like them for TVs, either.)