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It's odd to look back at what computers were like fifteen years ago. When I was growing up, the internet was unheard-of, floppy disks were floppy, screens were green on black, printers were dot matrix, computer games were so basic that they now have retro charm, I was one of the few students at my school writing my homework on the computer, and I did so using a word processor called Wordstar which threw a canary fit every time I inserted a footnote – and footnotes formed about a third of the text when translating Virgil. Or possibly the computer hated the virtuous Aeneas even more than I did.
At uni, I went through a few years of all-nighters in computer labs before getting a laptop of my own via the Disabled Students' Allowance. It was a 14” Toshiba Satellite Pro, with rather nice sound for a laptop. and a trackpoint, or “nipple” mouse, right in the middle of the keyboard. They don't seem to have been very popular, those trackpoints, and looking back they probably didn't have the all-singing all-dancing functions that mice and touchpads today need to have. I did like being able to mouse without taking my hands out of their usual typing position, and you'd think they'd be making a comeback for netbooks, small wireless keyboards and the like. I have to confess that the pointer function eventually went barmy and refused to do anything other than charge off to the top right corner of the screen, but that would probably have been fixable if the uni disability computing services had sorted out the motherboard instead of repeatedly replacing the keyboard.
So when that little laptop finally gave up the ghost in 2004, right in the middle of a raging (and hilarious) trolling drama on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
gothic_lit which necessitated hastily ringing up ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eye_of_a_cat and telling her how to hack into my LJ account so that she could become a co-moderator, I ended up buying a cheap and nasty laptop from PC World, under the illusion that it would only be temporary as I'd be getting another DSA-funded computer soon. I was stuck with that dreadful thing for years. The sound was almost inaudible, so I had a couple of little external speakers. The problem there was that I used to have the laptop on a little folding table by the sofa, or equally small overbed table by the bed, and those lightweight speakers were always getting knocked off. One of them was eventually held together by a hairclip. The moral of that story is that external speakers just don't work in that sort of environment, and you're better off making sure the laptop has decent sound before you buy it. This is something of a challenge, as it's too noisy to tell in shops, and computer salespersons always seem to think that I should have standards of a DJ and tell me that all laptops have lousy sound not worth bothering with at all. This is of course nonsense: some are hopeless, and some do a lovely job if you want to watch DVDs or listen to music, even if you're listening from the other side of the flat.
Last year, this beastie began to make alarming noises suggesting that its fan was unhappy. I cosseted it with a gel cooling mat, not to mention feeding it more RAM and buying it an external hard drive, but I couldn't deny that it was getting elderly. This is the time when netbooks had just exploded onto the computer scene, and I was eyeing them with great interest. I'd previously tried a Psion Revo Plus, a PDA which manages to be a forerunner of the netbook by dint of having such features as a keyboard, an acceptable screen size, and better storage and software than most PDAs. It's small and light enough to go in a pocket, and has a nifty clamshell design that keeps it open at a good typing angle and keeps it safe when closed. At first, I had great fun setting up prioritised to-do lists, using the diary function to remind me of appointments, jotting down notes on a variety of subjects, and keeping recipes. I never did manage to get the internet working on it. I think I needed to get a special modem for it, but the instructions were foggy on the subject and the modem was half the cost of the actual PDA.
I stopped using it after a few months, as the non-backlit monochrome screen and tiny keyboard became too awkward to be worthwhile. Once you've stopped using it, you're not that likely to go back, as it stops holding the data after a couple of weeks of being switched off. Uploading the data to save to a PC, followed by converting everything from Symbian to Windows, is a bit of a hassle to do repeatedly, and I never even found out whether it would be Vista-compatible. However, it proved itself invaluable on the occasion when my mother was rushed to hospital with septicaemia during a visit up here. It was a stressful and confusing time, and in the midst of this we had to make notes of medical information, contact everyone from the kennels to my mother's GP, rearrange appointments, extend hotel stays, get hold of the essentials my parents hadn't brought for a planned two-day visit, and work out who was going to do what and when. All of this was in a hospital, where we didn't have access to my laptop and bits of paper would easily get lost, not to mention that my ability to use a pen peters out after writing a few semi-legible words. A basic PDA wouldn't have been enough, as you can't ask a rushed doctor spouting unspellable medical jargon to hold on while you faff around tapping out every single letter on the touchscreen with your stylus. A netbook or very small laptop, if I'd had one, would have made it easier to sort out the correspondence that hospital stay necessitated, as well as providing some entertainment.
Back to the ailing laptop. Those gel cooling mats really make a difference, and I was hoping to get a few more months of life out of the thing yet. I'd been waiting for netbooks to come out in XP, as I use the RNIB's audiobook service via online streaming, which can only be used with NetPlexTalk, which only works in Windows. The idea was that I would get the 9" EEE for small-computer uses now, try to keep going between it and that dying duck of a 14" laptop for as long as possible while the prices went down and the specs went up on laptops, and eventually get a nice big 17" laptop for my main computer and for watching films on. The netbook could live on my sewing table in the living room, where I could listen to audiobooks while quilting and do the odd bit of internet browsing. Alternatively,ghost_of_a_flea and I could give up the lazy habit of watching films in bed, keep the larger laptop in the living room, and use the EEE as a nice little bedside computer. Since even a 17" laptop is perfectly fine for carrying around the house, it wouldn't be difficult to swap them around, it's just that having a netbook as well as a laptop would save constantly ferrying the same computer between rooms.
This didn't quite go as planned. Asus have been making a fortune out of building the netbook market, changing the product at breathtaking speed, always adding something new to grab buyers' attention. My main impression of the EEE PC 900, enticing as it was, was that it was a rushed job.
This was the first EEE PC to have XP installed on it, and the snags hadn't been ironed out yet. Mine was faulty on top of that, but a lot of the trouble appeared to be systemic. The first problem I encountered, once I got over the hurdle that it kept crashing on the "name for computer" page during set up, was that the font size was set to tiny. Add one of those glossy screens which look so pretty in the shop but are so hard on the eyes, and I simply couldn't read the thing. I'm used to messing about with the display, so I accordingly went to the display controls and resized the font. It was feeling stingy, it only resized half of the text. This was confusing to look at, still left half of the text unreadable, and it had made the icons fuzzy as a little free extra. The desktop icons had a mind of their own anyway, they kept travelling spontaneously to other parts of the screen, along with random extra versions of the volume controls which would magically appear in the middle of the screen and stay there until I rebooted.
At this point a friend suggested changing the resolution. The alternative resolution was highly distorted and unreadable, so I changed it back. Now, one of the unique charms of netbooks is that they shun the screen sizes used by the dull crowd of conventional laptops and have a screen that's the best size for the job. In other words, my netbook had a 9" screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600. Unfortunately, nobody had told it about this innovative strategy, and it thought it had a resolution of 1024 x 675. I rang Asus technical support to say that my netbook didn't recognise its native resolution and the display didn't fit on the screen any more, and the only thing they could suggest was resetting the computer, which is hardly the best solution. In their favour, I should add that when I rang them the other week to ask about the upcoming models, they said that this was a common complaint in the early days of the EEE PC but seems to have been sorted out by now. I assume that they have also sorted out another problem which their technical support team had no clue how to fix back then, which was that shift+2 showed @ instead of " in everything except MSN Messenger. (I dislike MSN Messenger, but it refused to install Trillian at all.) I also rang Microsoft, who told me that they were no longer supporting XP as it wasn't being put on new computers any more (they hadn't heard of netbooks at that time). I gather that Microsoft have since formally announced that XP can be put on netbooks, so they are presumably supporting it again. By the time I got to the discovery that if you woke the computer from standby with no programmes running, it would tell you that 76 programmes were running, I'd realised that the computer would have to go back to the store. So I removed the pretty desktop background I'd chosen and put the original desktop background back. It didn't fit the screen.
In other words, this particular machine was faulty and buggy as hell. These things happen, and it didn't leave me feeling that Asus netbooks were to be avoided for ever, just that they needed a little longer to get XP properly settled in, and that it was a very promising product to be watched with interest. The little keyboard didn't take long to get used to, though I did wonder whether the slightly odd position of my hands would be comfortable for more sustained use. The font size was the main thing that held me back from assessing it properly, because I had to be tethered to within a few inches of the screen, and thus couldn't get comfortable. I also found that you can't just plonk it on your lap in bed, it gets too hot. Had it not been for the squinting at the screen from a few inches away problem, I'd probably have found myself a comfortable setup with a lay tray and the gel cooling mat after experimenting for a while.
The gel cooling mat caused an unexpected problem, however. After all the complaints about the small screen size on the EEE PC 700 series, which had the speakers on either side of the screen, Asus decided to prioritise screen space and put the speakers on the underside of the netbook. The notion here is that when the sound bounces off a hard surface, it's actually rather good. The snag is that the whole idea of netbooks is that they're so small and light that you can use them practically anywhere (apart from directly on your lap if you don't want to get burns), so they're not necessarily going to be on a hard, flat surface. I have no idea how the sound would have been on the beach, or in all the other locations Asus happily suggests that you use it, but if you simply want to stop your netbook from overheating, you find out that the dimpled surface of a cooling mat muffles the sound considerably. I wasn't planning to watch films, I just wanted to be able to listen to audiobooks from a fairly close distance, and it was possible but iffy. For blind users who use text-to-speech, this is going to be a key issue. It's certainly possible, as one of the technical support guys at the RNIB told me that he has a Samsung netbook he uses with a screen reader which has beautiful sound. As for everyone else, considering the video revolution on the internet these days, I think netbook designers either need to pay more attention to improving the sound quality, or get together and form a conspiracy to exterminate YouTube.
By the time I'd sorted out the return with Play.com, which was a saga all in itself, the old laptop was emitting not so much of a gentle complaint as a death rattle. I put the netbook idea on the back burner and got myself a Toshiba P300-150 which behaves beautifully, fits on the overbed table with just enough space for a small mouse mat, fits plenty on its screen in any font size I want, has a great spec, fantastic sound, is wonderful for watching films on, and least importantly of all, is elegantly pinstriped in black and pewter.
To those of you who do have netbooks, which one do you have and how do you get on with it?
At uni, I went through a few years of all-nighters in computer labs before getting a laptop of my own via the Disabled Students' Allowance. It was a 14” Toshiba Satellite Pro, with rather nice sound for a laptop. and a trackpoint, or “nipple” mouse, right in the middle of the keyboard. They don't seem to have been very popular, those trackpoints, and looking back they probably didn't have the all-singing all-dancing functions that mice and touchpads today need to have. I did like being able to mouse without taking my hands out of their usual typing position, and you'd think they'd be making a comeback for netbooks, small wireless keyboards and the like. I have to confess that the pointer function eventually went barmy and refused to do anything other than charge off to the top right corner of the screen, but that would probably have been fixable if the uni disability computing services had sorted out the motherboard instead of repeatedly replacing the keyboard.
So when that little laptop finally gave up the ghost in 2004, right in the middle of a raging (and hilarious) trolling drama on
gothic_lit which necessitated hastily ringing up eye_of_a_cat and telling her how to hack into my LJ account so that she could become a co-moderator, I ended up buying a cheap and nasty laptop from PC World, under the illusion that it would only be temporary as I'd be getting another DSA-funded computer soon. I was stuck with that dreadful thing for years. The sound was almost inaudible, so I had a couple of little external speakers. The problem there was that I used to have the laptop on a little folding table by the sofa, or equally small overbed table by the bed, and those lightweight speakers were always getting knocked off. One of them was eventually held together by a hairclip. The moral of that story is that external speakers just don't work in that sort of environment, and you're better off making sure the laptop has decent sound before you buy it. This is something of a challenge, as it's too noisy to tell in shops, and computer salespersons always seem to think that I should have standards of a DJ and tell me that all laptops have lousy sound not worth bothering with at all. This is of course nonsense: some are hopeless, and some do a lovely job if you want to watch DVDs or listen to music, even if you're listening from the other side of the flat.Last year, this beastie began to make alarming noises suggesting that its fan was unhappy. I cosseted it with a gel cooling mat, not to mention feeding it more RAM and buying it an external hard drive, but I couldn't deny that it was getting elderly. This is the time when netbooks had just exploded onto the computer scene, and I was eyeing them with great interest. I'd previously tried a Psion Revo Plus, a PDA which manages to be a forerunner of the netbook by dint of having such features as a keyboard, an acceptable screen size, and better storage and software than most PDAs. It's small and light enough to go in a pocket, and has a nifty clamshell design that keeps it open at a good typing angle and keeps it safe when closed. At first, I had great fun setting up prioritised to-do lists, using the diary function to remind me of appointments, jotting down notes on a variety of subjects, and keeping recipes. I never did manage to get the internet working on it. I think I needed to get a special modem for it, but the instructions were foggy on the subject and the modem was half the cost of the actual PDA.
I stopped using it after a few months, as the non-backlit monochrome screen and tiny keyboard became too awkward to be worthwhile. Once you've stopped using it, you're not that likely to go back, as it stops holding the data after a couple of weeks of being switched off. Uploading the data to save to a PC, followed by converting everything from Symbian to Windows, is a bit of a hassle to do repeatedly, and I never even found out whether it would be Vista-compatible. However, it proved itself invaluable on the occasion when my mother was rushed to hospital with septicaemia during a visit up here. It was a stressful and confusing time, and in the midst of this we had to make notes of medical information, contact everyone from the kennels to my mother's GP, rearrange appointments, extend hotel stays, get hold of the essentials my parents hadn't brought for a planned two-day visit, and work out who was going to do what and when. All of this was in a hospital, where we didn't have access to my laptop and bits of paper would easily get lost, not to mention that my ability to use a pen peters out after writing a few semi-legible words. A basic PDA wouldn't have been enough, as you can't ask a rushed doctor spouting unspellable medical jargon to hold on while you faff around tapping out every single letter on the touchscreen with your stylus. A netbook or very small laptop, if I'd had one, would have made it easier to sort out the correspondence that hospital stay necessitated, as well as providing some entertainment.
Back to the ailing laptop. Those gel cooling mats really make a difference, and I was hoping to get a few more months of life out of the thing yet. I'd been waiting for netbooks to come out in XP, as I use the RNIB's audiobook service via online streaming, which can only be used with NetPlexTalk, which only works in Windows. The idea was that I would get the 9" EEE for small-computer uses now, try to keep going between it and that dying duck of a 14" laptop for as long as possible while the prices went down and the specs went up on laptops, and eventually get a nice big 17" laptop for my main computer and for watching films on. The netbook could live on my sewing table in the living room, where I could listen to audiobooks while quilting and do the odd bit of internet browsing. Alternatively,
ghost_of_a_flea and I could give up the lazy habit of watching films in bed, keep the larger laptop in the living room, and use the EEE as a nice little bedside computer. Since even a 17" laptop is perfectly fine for carrying around the house, it wouldn't be difficult to swap them around, it's just that having a netbook as well as a laptop would save constantly ferrying the same computer between rooms.This didn't quite go as planned. Asus have been making a fortune out of building the netbook market, changing the product at breathtaking speed, always adding something new to grab buyers' attention. My main impression of the EEE PC 900, enticing as it was, was that it was a rushed job.
This was the first EEE PC to have XP installed on it, and the snags hadn't been ironed out yet. Mine was faulty on top of that, but a lot of the trouble appeared to be systemic. The first problem I encountered, once I got over the hurdle that it kept crashing on the "name for computer" page during set up, was that the font size was set to tiny. Add one of those glossy screens which look so pretty in the shop but are so hard on the eyes, and I simply couldn't read the thing. I'm used to messing about with the display, so I accordingly went to the display controls and resized the font. It was feeling stingy, it only resized half of the text. This was confusing to look at, still left half of the text unreadable, and it had made the icons fuzzy as a little free extra. The desktop icons had a mind of their own anyway, they kept travelling spontaneously to other parts of the screen, along with random extra versions of the volume controls which would magically appear in the middle of the screen and stay there until I rebooted.
At this point a friend suggested changing the resolution. The alternative resolution was highly distorted and unreadable, so I changed it back. Now, one of the unique charms of netbooks is that they shun the screen sizes used by the dull crowd of conventional laptops and have a screen that's the best size for the job. In other words, my netbook had a 9" screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600. Unfortunately, nobody had told it about this innovative strategy, and it thought it had a resolution of 1024 x 675. I rang Asus technical support to say that my netbook didn't recognise its native resolution and the display didn't fit on the screen any more, and the only thing they could suggest was resetting the computer, which is hardly the best solution. In their favour, I should add that when I rang them the other week to ask about the upcoming models, they said that this was a common complaint in the early days of the EEE PC but seems to have been sorted out by now. I assume that they have also sorted out another problem which their technical support team had no clue how to fix back then, which was that shift+2 showed @ instead of " in everything except MSN Messenger. (I dislike MSN Messenger, but it refused to install Trillian at all.) I also rang Microsoft, who told me that they were no longer supporting XP as it wasn't being put on new computers any more (they hadn't heard of netbooks at that time). I gather that Microsoft have since formally announced that XP can be put on netbooks, so they are presumably supporting it again. By the time I got to the discovery that if you woke the computer from standby with no programmes running, it would tell you that 76 programmes were running, I'd realised that the computer would have to go back to the store. So I removed the pretty desktop background I'd chosen and put the original desktop background back. It didn't fit the screen.
In other words, this particular machine was faulty and buggy as hell. These things happen, and it didn't leave me feeling that Asus netbooks were to be avoided for ever, just that they needed a little longer to get XP properly settled in, and that it was a very promising product to be watched with interest. The little keyboard didn't take long to get used to, though I did wonder whether the slightly odd position of my hands would be comfortable for more sustained use. The font size was the main thing that held me back from assessing it properly, because I had to be tethered to within a few inches of the screen, and thus couldn't get comfortable. I also found that you can't just plonk it on your lap in bed, it gets too hot. Had it not been for the squinting at the screen from a few inches away problem, I'd probably have found myself a comfortable setup with a lay tray and the gel cooling mat after experimenting for a while.
The gel cooling mat caused an unexpected problem, however. After all the complaints about the small screen size on the EEE PC 700 series, which had the speakers on either side of the screen, Asus decided to prioritise screen space and put the speakers on the underside of the netbook. The notion here is that when the sound bounces off a hard surface, it's actually rather good. The snag is that the whole idea of netbooks is that they're so small and light that you can use them practically anywhere (apart from directly on your lap if you don't want to get burns), so they're not necessarily going to be on a hard, flat surface. I have no idea how the sound would have been on the beach, or in all the other locations Asus happily suggests that you use it, but if you simply want to stop your netbook from overheating, you find out that the dimpled surface of a cooling mat muffles the sound considerably. I wasn't planning to watch films, I just wanted to be able to listen to audiobooks from a fairly close distance, and it was possible but iffy. For blind users who use text-to-speech, this is going to be a key issue. It's certainly possible, as one of the technical support guys at the RNIB told me that he has a Samsung netbook he uses with a screen reader which has beautiful sound. As for everyone else, considering the video revolution on the internet these days, I think netbook designers either need to pay more attention to improving the sound quality, or get together and form a conspiracy to exterminate YouTube.
By the time I'd sorted out the return with Play.com, which was a saga all in itself, the old laptop was emitting not so much of a gentle complaint as a death rattle. I put the netbook idea on the back burner and got myself a Toshiba P300-150 which behaves beautifully, fits on the overbed table with just enough space for a small mouse mat, fits plenty on its screen in any font size I want, has a great spec, fantastic sound, is wonderful for watching films on, and least importantly of all, is elegantly pinstriped in black and pewter.
To those of you who do have netbooks, which one do you have and how do you get on with it?
