Recent netbooks with Solid State Drives?

[David Curtis]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:15 PM, Bill Moseley <moseley at hank.org> wrote:

> I'm about to spend months traveling and looking for a netbook/laptop to use
> for Google Apps, uploading photos, minor photo editing (e.g. reduce photo
> size before sending over slow link), and pretty good on batteries and light
> weight.
>
> There's a good list here:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks
>
> That's a long list to work through, so does anyone here have recent
> experience with any of those listed that can share their opinions?
>
As far as battery life and weight are concerned, I could not recommend my HP
Mini 210 more. I ran into two issues with the one I purchased here in
Canada, hardware may differ in other countries. One, the Broadcom wireless
card needs proprietary drivers, therefore USB installation of Ubuntu needs
an extra few steps. Two, it comes with a Synaptics Clickpad, a newer type of
touchpad, 10.04 LTS has a workaround. Maverick and Natty supposedly have
in-kernel support, but I failed to get right-click to work properly on
Maverick and am still waiting for proper configuration in Natty.

Of course this may not be specific to HP as others also use the Clickpad, if
you focus on a brand, my suggestion is to find in-depth specs online and see
if there are any show stopper hardware issues. Also some netbooks/laptops
blacklist/whitelist hardware in the BIOS, you may need to flash the bios
with a hack to get any mini-pci cards to work that you may wish to add in
the future.

As far as physical design of the HP mini 210, access to mem/PCI/HD is
perfect, no need for a screw driver except for the mini-PCI. The front bezel
scratches easily, needs bigger rubber stoppers in the corners, had mine 9-10
months and need to replace the plastic screen cover already, but I carry it
_everywhere_ in a satchel or backpack. Frankly, I beat on the thing and it
has survived aside from the scratches.

HTH

Dave
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