Below Belief

It was £150 and it’s a tiny Dell netbook – very light, good (3 hour) battery life and a decent screen. It’s a bit of a toy really and I expect to use it when travelling (and the laptop is too big to take), for downloading photos on the go, for blogging, for browsing the net around the house.

I’m toying with putting Ubuntu (Linux) or maybe even Hackintosh on it – more as an experimental platform really.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Things I like so far: very light, and very fast to start up (not much on it – I’m expecting that it’ll be even faster with one of the other OSs on it). The screen is also nice and bright and just about big enough for web browsing.

The keyboard is very small – like embarrassing when you start typing… takes a bit of getting used to. But I’m typing this now and not having too many problems, I’d say 70% as good as a normal size laptop. I made a few tweaks already to make it better:

First was a good clean with windowlene on the screen and keyboard…

The first problem I had today was the space bar wasn’t working properly -so I prised it off with a screwdriver, cleaned underneath and snapped the key back on – now it’s working nicely. It was only working when you pressed the center – not either end – and I typically use both when typing.

The other problem was that the Delete key is right next to the left arrow key and they’re small… so I used www.keytweak.com to swap the delete key with the Alt Rt key next to it – and then the instructions here: http://www.machinaelectronics.com/store/library/article.cfm?f=key_type_k06 to actually swap the physical key caps on those keys. Much better.

Now I keep hitting return when I mean to hit apostrophe – for some reason that key is even smaller than normal… not sure what to do about that yet!

Will update if I do more cool stuff.