Netbook failure, purchase of new netbook

After beating my ASUS EEEPC 900a senseless for 9 months, it finally gave up the ghost.  It would not reach the BIOS screen, and well… not much you can do at that point.  I dismantled it, inspected the insides, with no visible damages.

SO, since it was to me an experimental machine due to the solid state drive, and the Intel Atom processor, etc, it happens.

For a replacement, I looked around and found a sale on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 netbook for $239.  Same processor, an Atom N270 1.6Ghz, a decent amount of ram (1gb), and a real harddrive inside!  160Gb laptop harddrive, enough to handle almost triple the space on the old system.

The surprise was immense.  The system looks remarkably better, though that I could really care less about.  Though the screen is much better quality, with a much better resolution clarity and crisper… same screen size (8.9″).  It booted windows xp very quickly, and the drive made windows snappy.  snappier than any windows machine I’ve touched in awhile.  There is also a built-in “D2D” disk restore which you can hold down alt and press f12 during boot to activate.  It blasts away everything and restores you drive with stuff on a saved partition.  The only downside to this is that the boot sector is proprietary, and once you install another boot sector onto it, the D2D restore will not work.

All in all, the system is very responsive, and is not hot temperature wise.  I am enjoying it, and the fact that it seems Linux-friendly as well.  I haven’t installed a distribution yet (bows head) but I have used “systemrescuecd” which I am typing from now… everything was usable and I’ve resized the NTFS partition with gparted just before this.  *crosses fingers*  we’ll see how things are when I reboot, but everything usually works great with that.

I’ve stored the entire harddrive on my other system as an image (13gb gzipped) so no worries there thankfully.