Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler May have to consider this new laptop....

I've also been waiting for it to finally arrive. I don't need a regular laptop and this little netbook seems to fit the bill.

I've also been looking at this http://www.notebookreview.com:80/default.asp?newsID=4575 the Acer Aspire One, currently going for $399CDN with WindowsXP at Staples

I'm also undecided about a solid state hard disk, can anyone list the pros/cons of these?

I've been tempted by those, too.

Asus makes some nice ones.

Wayne, I don't think there is a downside except capacity. It seems like to have this small a footprint, you might have to run Linux instead of XP, which doesn't make me comfortable because I just don't splash in that pond enough.

That's pretty cool. I didn't know Dell was getting in on the micro-laptop scene.

It comes with Ubuntu, which is a great & easy-to-use Linux distro. I'm a Windows guy myself too, but Ubuntu is pretty darn good. I wouldn't be afraid of it.

The Tech Specs page says that XP SP3 is available. Continuing with the Tech Specs... it's an Intel Atom 1.6Ghz processor with 1GB of RAM and (up to) a 16GB SSD.

I've run XP on PC's with slower processors and less ram, so I'd think it would run just fine. It won't have enough space to house your MP3 collection, but as a email/document/web browsing appliance, it'd be great.

The size makes it very tempting.

Thanks, Peter. I really appreciate that perspective. But what about the OS footprint on the disk?

You mean clown-shoe-print, right? You might have 1 gig left over.

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought.

Hard to say. There are so many options in installing Ubuntu (or any Linux distro) that it's impossible to say how much space it will take up on it's own. The 'Live Evaluation' version of Ubuntu, for instance, fits on one standard 650MB CD. There's one version of Linux that fits on a 1.44MB 3.5" disk.

The last time I installed the stanard desktop Ubuntu at home with the default options, I believe that it took up about 2GB of space.

I don't remember excactly, but I think a standard, clean XP install will take up about 2-3GB. But XP can also be customized. There's at least one version of XP that's designed for limited-space systems.

But iTunes doesn't run on Linux!!