Since the old netbook vanished into our eldest daughter’s room, I have been without a mobile computer of my own. I had been using the Dell laptop we bought as a shared computer for the younger children, but it became obvious last week that we couldn’t keep doing that. As much as the idea of sharing a computer is a good one, when your Dad is a software developer, you never quite know what operating system is going to appear on the screen when you boot it up (or boot loader, but I’m not going to get into that here…).
After making a shortlist earlier in the week, I finally got a chance this weekend to go shopping for the replacement computer. Here it is;
It’s an ASUS EEE 1005PX. In common with just about every other budget netbook on the market at the moment, it has the new(ish) Intel N450 chipset in it, which means it will last about 9 hours of typical use. It’s running Windows 7 Starter Edition, which I have never seen before - we always have the kitchen-sink version at work.
It only came with 1 gigabyte of memory, so first stop was an online purveyor of memory chips to buy as much as will fit inside it. Should arrive sometime mid-week.
Other than that, I’m not going to fiddle with it too much. I removed all the crapware from it immediately - including the “free” version of Microsoft Office 2010 (yeah, right - free for one month). Quite why it had SQL Server Compact Edition installed is anybody’s guess. Said goodbye to Trend Antivirus too.
The main reason for having the netbook at all is to allow me to carry on with freelance web projects while sitting in the lounge with my better half - so we can spend a bit more time together. Working in the study is nice, but it gets pretty lonely.