This isn’t the sexiest net book out there. Far from it. But it is a practical netbook for those on a budget. I picked this up for under $200. Unlike my Dynex TV, that I picked up from Best Buy at the same time this still works. Shame on you Best Buy, shame on you. They can’t even find my receipt, and I am starting at the bank statement that shows that I purchased it.
Well, I have digressed. Consumer Reports considers this to be a Best Buy. It could be better. Keep in mind that this machine only has 1GB of RAM. Most serious computing devices have anywhere from 2GB or more these days. It comes with a Intel Atom N455 processor and Windows 7 Starter. The software is a special version of Office that only includes Word and Excel. Office 2010 Starter contains ads; that shouldn’t be a problem, except that, at only 7 inches, you need all of the real estate you can get on this computer.
This is the type of machine you only want to run one program at a time. People think that because they have Windows 7 they can do anything. You are only running Windows Vista final release after beta. I would put Linux on this machine but my wife uses it. I already have Ubuntu 11.1 on my computer that really does have Windows Vista on it. I had to install all of the drivers, not much of a hassle finally figured out how to increase the size of the virtual disk; didn’t see much of a performance increase though. Sometimes when your hardware is from 2007 you need to move on.
I am a creature of habit though I’ll use this slow hardware until 2015. This is a good computer if you just some entry level hardware to play around with but I don’t recommend it for serious use. When you consider that a license for Office costs more than this machine is worth, you pretty much already know what it is. If you know what you are doing you could dual boot this machine, but it is a very, very, entry level Windows 7 machine, bare minimum requirements.
This is a very strange machine; you get two hard drives of around 100 GB each. The Windows Experience score is only 2.3.