I’ve been tired of my Toshiba A215 notebook since I bought it. I was in a situation where I needed to replace my existing notebook when I bought it and Microcenter had a “deal” on it. The “deal” was it was cheaper if I walked out the door carrying it and a Cannon Pixima printer than if I bought the notebook alone. The Pixima was a source of frustration with expensive ink and continual error codes. I was glad the day it died. Such a Deal!
The Toshiba has a fan which makes a lot of noise and cycles constantly. You cannot leave it turned on in a hotel room if you expect to get any sleep. Even when it is in sleep mode the fan spins up just about the time you are drifting off into sleep. The air flow of the machine is such that I was never able to use it in bed. I mean really, if you can’t block the air flow and have to stay plugged into the wall due to a battery life which seems like whole minutes instead of hours, is it really something you want to lug to bed then find a place to put on your already overcrowded night stand?
I really wanted an Acer notebook because they have come up in quality and they tend to make more computers with AMD processors. I simply couldn’t find one at a price I liked. Actually, it was more not being able to find than price. Then I found a netbook at newegg.com. It had everything I wanted, sans a DVD. 4Gig of RAM, 500Gig drive. Not that I would use Windows, but it even came with 64-bit Windows 7 instead of Windows 8. The machine showed up this week and it is simply a dream. The 11.6” display is amazing. The keyboard is almost big enough to do some serious typing on. All I had to do now was get a Linux distro with KDE installed and I would be golden!
First I downloaded KUbuntu 12.10, but, could not successfully boot the live CD. Later I found posts on-line that said you had to install from Alternate Installation media, hack some custom drivers, and live with shortcomings. Not for me.
Next I found this post.
After reading through it I decided I would be a bit smarter and download System Rescue CD to resize the partition before installing Linux Mint 13 KDE. Silly me. After taking the time to resize the partition I found out the Mint installer still only gives you two choices..full wipe and install, or manually configure everything. Who needs Windows? Wipe and install!
I’m busy installing updates now, along with Focus Writer, some fonts, leafpad, and KWrite.
If you are looking for the perfect gift for the geek on your list, this netbook could be it. You have enough ram and disk space to actually do development if you had to. More importantly, it appears to be the kind of computer you really can use in bed. Light as a feather, super quiet, and it doesn’t appear you will block the air flow with the comforter.
