Been offered a net book, opinions please.

McKneff

It is
.
MSI net book. Atom, windows starter. 16 hz 1gb ram HDD 120 or 160 gb

She says its in good condition, on a local auction site, lives quite near, and assures me about the condition. Loads of people waiting to see if I buy it or not. She says she is short of money and wanted to get rid quick.

Edit - sorry £50, all I need it for is for surfing, email, on here, just basic stuff really as I have my PB Easynote for anything else.

Any thoughts please on the spec.

System

depends on what you are going to be doing with it - mine currently keeps a desk level!
I always found mine a bit underpowered, even after upping the ram to 2gb

McKneff

Just basic surfing when we go away, or being on here.

DUTR

McKneff wrote: »

Just basic surfing when we go away, or being on here.

It seems a similar spec to my HP 2133 and I have had that a good few years now and still use it, I'm running linux mint on it, but have put windows xp on there in the past, got a portable disc drive for the odd use occasion .
For watching films, browsing etc it is more than fine.

McKneff

Many thanks for your input, It seems it is just what I want.

woo hoo, my son who will be visiting in a couple of months time is a compute whizz kid so he can upgrade it then.

sillygoose

McKneff wrote: »

It is
.
MSI net book. Atom, windows starter. 16 hz 1gb ram HDD 120 or 160 gb

She says its in good condition, on a local auction site, lives quite near, and assures me about the condition. Loads of people waiting to see if I buy it or not. She says she is short of money and wanted to get rid quick.

Edit - sorry £50, all I need it for is for surfing, email, on here, just basic stuff really as I have my PB Easynote for anything else.

Any thoughts please on the spec.

16hz? presume its a 1.6GHz Atom cpu? sound good to me if it in half decent condition. I have a very similar Samsung one but with 2Gb of memory, same CPU. Perfectly useful device, mine is always on sat on the arm of the sofa. During the TV ad's I do various stuff on it and it copes fine. The advantage of being low powered is the battery on these often last a long time too.
I strongly recommend using Chrome browser on in, works so much better than Internet Explorer on slower machines. They are great for taking on holiday if you can find some wifi too, lighter to pack in hand luggage.

John_Gray

The reasons why I never bought a netbook were because:

• screen resolution only 1024x600
• keyboard too small for my fingers
• CPU underpowered
• no optical drive

However, you might find that none of these cause you a problem!

NiftyDigits

John_Gray wrote: »

The reasons why I never bought a netbook were because:

• screen resolution only 1024x600
• keyboard too small for my fingers
• CPU underpowered
• no optical drive

However, you might find that none of these cause you a problem!

and that they were more than £50?

My old ZG5 is still very useful for travel and quite capable of most everyday tasks, though it is important to trim down on any unnecessary programs that utilise RAM and CPU.

John_Gray

NiftyDigits wrote: »

and that they were more than £50?

If something doesn't do what you want, it doesn't matter how cheap it is!

poppellerant

John_Gray wrote: »

The reasons why I never bought a netbook were because:

• screen resolution only 1024x600
• keyboard too small for my fingers
• CPU underpowered
• no optical drive

However, you might find that none of these cause you a problem!

I can agree on the screen resolution being restrictive, and even more annoying when there's an inch thick bezel surrounding the screen. Also with the CPU being underpowered, but they can be overclocked.

I have to disagree with the keyboard being too small. I can type pretty quickly on my netbook, but perhaps this depends on how well the keyboard is made and laid out.

I also have to disagree about having no optical drive. I've had my netbook for some time, and the only time I find myself needing an optical drive is when an old computer's BIOS doesn't support booting from USB - but this becoming increasingly rare.

£50 sounds decent. Plonk a cheap SSD drive in, max out the memory and it'll be even better. The best thing I did for my netbook was put a 60gb SSD drive in, and that cost me in the region of £30-40 a few years back for a second hand one, and it still works now!

Depending on the make and model, you can increase the clock speed of the graphic chip to make viewing Youtube videos less painful. Perhaps even overclock the CPU clock speed. Both of these are done every time you load Windows, though, and aren't permanent changes.

McKneff

Thank you all so much for your help.

I did try a tablet, but could I heck as like get on with the touchscreen.
So it went back. I like the keyboard, having been a typist most of me life. I only have little fingers lol.

I'll have to keep this thread on the favourites bar so I dont forget the advice give.
Thanks Again
Annie.