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"Netbook" advice

Ah, so. They've finally implemented the "flash" hard drive. I saw this from more than a year ago. The transfer rate should be much faster than a regular hard disk (how much I dunno), but the regular hard disk is the last throughput bottleneck in a computer system. The benefits are obvious.

Your choice. But I'll tell you to go with Win7.

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The ram is upgradedable to 2GB but you have to take apart the whole laptop to do it. There are some videos on youtube that show you how.

I have 160GB version and it is fast enough for me. Having 10 times the storage is worth it being slightly slower.

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I would imagine a 16gb ssd would be quite full after a Win7 installation. I bought 2 Netbooks for the kids for x-mas, however they both had Linux installed. I ended up using a thumbdrive for a bootable version of XP to install and it works pretty good. Of course I upgraded to 1gb ram each and disabled/removed a ton of features off of XP to save space (we have the 8gb version).

Personally, I would go with the 160gb drive since you are going to end up buying something additional once you max out that 16gb SSD.

That's simply my .02.

Good luck regardless.

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I can't find the link right now, but while perusing Black Friday ads this morning, SOMEONE had a netbook listed for 50% off, at $150. If I can remember where I saw it, I'll post a link for you. (As for your question... Personally, I would much rather have the 160GB of storage space than a faster 16GB).

If you want to step up a bit in size and power, Best Buy has an HP laptop for $197, but you'll probably have to get up VERY early on Friday to get one.

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Yea, and there's usually a limit of 5 units per store, so they will fly off the shelves before you even get there.

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The consensus seems to be that windows 7 isn't the problem that vista was on netbooks. It is reasonably close to xp, so I don't think there is much chance that the performance of an ssd would be significantly harmed, especially in comparison to the kinds of hard drives you find on netbooks(which tend to be considerably slower than desktop drives).

Having said that, note that the windows 7 version is the starter version, which is pretty neutered compared to even basic. There is no aero, can't even change the desktop wallpaper. You can see a pretty good list at this wiki page:

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions

If none of those things are issues for you then it comes down to the trade off of performance for space. If you aren't going to put much on it or have an external hard drive for mobile use (no wall wart) then the ssd version may be more compelling. But I wouldn't worry about OS performance differences. The ssd will be much faster than the hard drive.

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When did the type of SSD they put in netbooks get faster than a regular HD? I thought that was the knock on SSDs, namely that they were slower than a regular HD when it came to read/write operations. Don't get me wrong because I have a 16 GB SSD in my HP 1030 NR to which I did a lot of tweaking (e.g. Ramdisk) to speed it up. Just curious that I might have missed something new.
--
Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.

reply to 45071419
Thanks all for the input. That is great info.

You have to yank the mobo to change the RAM. Yikes!

I'm going WinXP with the biggest SATA drive. We'll see how she performs.

And FIOS Dan: I thought that the SSD's were always smoking fast compared to hard drives in the read area, but most SSD's lagged behind in the write area (unless you bought a kicks ass high $ SSD). But I keep reading in Maximum PC about some instruction that the SSD manufacturers are including on the SSD controller board(?) that greatly speeds up the writes to the SSD. I tried to find the explanation about this, but can't find it.

Thanks again all.

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I'm going to pull the trigger on the WinXP version and will most likely leave it at 1Gb of RAM. You have to get Win7 if you want the SSD. There must be a reason for that.

I found that command on the SSD's. It's the TRIM command, and it's pretty new. Your drive firmware needs to support it, and you also need have to have Win7 or Linux Kernel 2.6.28 (or higher?). If your drive or OS does not not support TRIM, you can wipe your SSD's free space with wiper.exe (usually provided by the SSD manufacturer) to speed up your writes if you have had your SSD for a while and have written data to most of your blocks.

»www.maximumpc.com/article/ask_do···_support

You can get a much more in depth write up about TRIM (hehe) from Maximum PC in their latest "holiday" issue. This issue should be available for free on the Maximum PC website in the PDF Archive in a couple of weeks. The article is on page 60.