Don’t Waste Your Time and Cash With This – Chrome Netbook Critique

I installed Squeeze, the current stable version. It doesn’t support wireless networking. My husband and I travel a lot out of the country and purchased this Netbook mostly for this reason, I feel like the Netbook will fit perfectly with our travels. I haven’t had much of a chance to use this yet because I bought the wrong memory upgrade based on “best if bought together” recommendation on Amazon.

I cannot recommend the carrying case that Amazon here recommends because there is no good place to store the power supply, except to force it in and begin wearing it down, but I am not dinging my rating here based on the case, just be forewarned about it! Whoops, I almost forgot to scream (in a bad way) at Amazon for how they ship this! My Dell laptop has a max of about 4 hours. This is important to me since I will be using this netbook at work while on the road visiting hospitals and surgery centers.

I think this netbook is great and the best. And I was astonished by the keyboard.

The touchpad buttons on my NB505 seem to drop sometimes even while pressed (it could just be me), IMO they could have been designed better. And, in case anyone even mentions the fact that the hi-resolution isn’t supported, well it is!

Windows 7 Live Mail is terrific and can meet all your email needs. I am a photographer and during the AK trip took tons of pictures, downloading them all onto the little Toshiba which didn’t blink once. Better and larger Touchpad. Buy yours before Toshiba realizes this machine has the best value/price ratio. I like this little machine and I bought a Toshiba because my last one (Satellite) lasted a decade. Toshibas are unusually easy to take apart and repair, and this one looks like it would be easy to tear apart also.

Also, it has Windows “Starter” vs Windows 7 “Home Premium” which most desktop computers come with) but son says that is actually better because it allows the netbook to work faster (because he tells me that “Starter” is 32 bit and Home Premium is 64 bit). I got this laptop for my birthday, and I have to say that I am incredibly happy with this little puppy! The keyboard feels fairly close to a regular laptop keyboard, the keys are only a tad smaller but not small enough to create problems when typing. The battery life also seems good so far (I’ve had this only a few weeks). I have been typing on every netbook I’ve come across for at least a year, and so far this keyboard has been the best one. Something about the way it’s laid out just makes it seem more expansive. You just can’t beat this little machine…the small size takes some getting used to but the keyboard is full-sized and while the key arrangement may be different it’s much easier than many of the keyboards I looked at. I had to buy it from Microcenter ($10 less than Amazon) because I was traveling and needed it right away. Also battery life has dropped from 11 hours (NB305) to 9.5 hours (NB505), according to their specs. I am not sure if this is a different 6 cell battery, a function of the Atom 455, or Win 7.

I have already ordered the 2 gig memory stick from Crucial and will take care of that as soon as possible. Wanted to try the 1 gig first and while it is quite fast for a small netbook with 1.66 GHz processor, 2 gigs of memory will make a big difference.

I decided to try a netbook, which would also allow me to access Wi-Fi hotspots, surf the Internet, etc. WHOLESALE DOG FOOD.