[clue-talk] saving money with Linux

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 13:23 -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:
> Personally ONLY the portability of a Netbook is appealing... the CPU's

I think you underestimate the value of Netbooks because you are
comparing them to high quality, high power laptops meant to satisfy more
demanding computing activities.  The lack of a DVD drive is the first
clue that these are not meant to compete with contemporary laptops but
rather provide limited functionality in a very small, lightweight and
portable package.

Earlier this year I bought an HP 2140 "business" netbook for use on a
five month cross country trip involving about 18,000 miles of driving
and lots of camping.  The benefit of the 2140 was being able to have a
full featured Linux environment with 160G of disk space, a 10" LED lit
screen and a five hour battery in only 3 pounds.  I used it to download
photos from my Nikon D90, watch television and movies, listen to mp3s,
write about my trip and of course, access email and the internet in
public places... all without having to pull out the 6.5 pound laptop
from the trunk.

I brought my 2140 to the last installfest and it was a joy to use as an
simple way to do research on the net and test external peripherals not
working on other machines.

To put it simpy: if you list all the common consumer-oriented activites
that can be done with a computer, most can be done comfortably on a
Netbook and only a short list of demanding and/or recently introduced
activities cannot.  You can't play HDTV movies, for example, but you can
ask it to perform as a server for samba, web, ftp, etc.  It may not be
as fast as a contemporary laptop, but it can do it.

So it's all relative and for $400 my 2140 is one of the best computing
tools I've purchased in a long time that I expect to use for a very long
time.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler