Argos? Are you Greek!? Anyway, all netbooks are pretty much the same you just gotta be careful with the battery. Never get the 3cell ones they only last for about 2 hours.

RG100 looks up the word "Argos" using Wikipedia, and now understands. I meant Argos the retailer, not Argos the Greek city.

Regarding the battery, there's a sticker on the front right section that says "max. 11h". I reckon that's a good battery.

And what's that cute uh...monkey (or is it a doggy? puppy?) doing there....? 😁

Malik wrote:

And what's that cute uh...monkey (or is it a doggy? puppy?) doing there....? 😁

Hehe, that's Junior. I'm not sure what it is exactly. I think it's supposed to be a puppy, but it's got a distinctive monkey-like face!

You too, Retro? That makes 2 of us here who use a netbook to play old games! I still have my Asus Eee PC netbook, I'm taking it out and about with me these days - to Barnes and Noble's cafe, the food court in the mall, Panera Bread - and I not only game on it with older games, but I play DVD movies on it, too! Mine only has a 3 cell battery but I always take the power cord with me and I'm glad to always be able to find a table near a wall outlet.

How do you like your new netbook, Retro? Are you going to put Virtual PC/VMware Player on it and install older windows OSes to play older Windows games? Are you going to be taking your netbook out and about with you like I do with mine?

Yup, netbooks sure are neat, aren't they? They're compact, lightweight, fit real good into a regular backpack, and they're a lot of fun!

I must confess to being completely ignorant about installing Win9x on to a more modern Windows OS, using a virtual "parent" app. As I am very keen on getting Win9x to run on old hardware, I do not need this functionality. For this netbook, I am happy to stick to DOSBox. (I still want to complete my 486 mobo testing however, and use real DOS. I like the idea of using both DOSBox and real DOS on old hardware.)

I got a netbook so I could throw a ~1KG device in to a suitcase and be able to connect to the net, do word processing, email, and play some old DOS games. Vogons is easily my #1 favourite website. I wouldn't want to miss that! (I'm incredibly grateful for all the advice people have offered over the years, when I have asked questions about old hardware.)

This netbook is my first portable device. Before that, I briefly borrowed a 486 laptop in 1996! I've used this netbook now for 2 days now, and I think -

Cons

No optical drive. That's not a problem. You can get an external USB device for that, if needed.
You're looking downwards at the table a lot, and this makes my neck ache!
"Smart" touch pad clicks on things you don't want to click on. This is bad. I've tried to switch this off, but sometimes onscreen buttons will still be clicked for me, when I didn't want to click on them.
Generally speaking, Windows 7 seems fairly ordinary, nothing particularly special - like Vista Mark2.
Generally speaking, the screen is quite good, but maybe a bit harsh.
Toshiba installs lots of software on it, which I don't need and will remove. I had to get rid of a subscription based Anti-virus package in order to install a free one. Also, they install a "health check" app on it that sounds dubious. It sends back data to Toshiba including your serial number.

Pros

Awesome battery life, and fast recharging time.
It's light. Not sure exactly, but without the battery, probably 1KG. I think the battery weighs about 300g.
Quite fast to boot in to Windows 7 (approx 30 secs), and performance seems reasonable.
Webcam quite good quality.
Good keyboard.
Good value for money, IMHO.

Overall I would say 8 out of 10, recommended.

Kelly Stiver wrote:

You too, Retro? That makes 2 of us here who use a netbook to play old games!

That makes three. I've been traveling a lot lately, and carrying a legacy desktop PC around is not quite practical. It limits my option to DOSBOX games --not it is a bad thing. I can also play old Windows games that run on XP, like Jane's Fighters Anthology or Vangers.

The nice thing about playing low-res (320x200) games on netbook is that the pictures look sharper and less blocky on such small screen.

@RG100: how did you take such "recursive" photo of your netbook? EDIT: external webcam, wasn't it?

photographed twice

You could try installing win9x natively on the netbook, if you have enough HD space.

Regarding the recursive photo - Junior is playing Jedi mind tricks on you!
But seriously, h-a-l-9000 is correct. I took a photo of the netbook, and wanted to see how it looked, so I viewed it on the netbook. Then, as this photo was still on screen, I took another photo of the netbook, and used that photo to upload to Vogons.

Regarding installing Win9x on a netbook - I don't think any netbooks have a chipset driver for win9x, and so I don't think win9x would install correctly.

Hmm, it could be probably adapted to run xp driver chipsets. There's a program that can be installed on win9x that allows it to run programs that were made for xp and later. I dont know if it works for drivers too nonetheless.

My netbook has XP. I bought it in the final week of January of this year, at a local brick and mortar Best Buy partly to make myself feel better as I left the house in a rotten mood and partly to solve an burning problem that I had on my mind since December, which was the question of how was I going to be able to afford a new netbook that has a larger hard drive and fuller keyboard in addition to buying a new PC in Feb.? This itchy problem solved itself by my going out and buying that netbook that same week when I saw them on the shelf at Best Buy - and these (with XP) were being discontinued, and they had only 7 of these in stock - all the others had Windows 7 on them, so me being a XP host fan, I decided to buy one of these 7 XP models of which there was only 1 kind - the Asus Eee PC, with its full sized keyboard, and 160 GB hard drive vs. the skimpy keyboard and the 16 GB hard drive of the Dell Inspiron netbook that I had received from a nephew several months before I bought the Asus Eee PC netbook - and, combined with an Asus external USB DL DVD/CD drive and usb mouse, I'm very happy with my netbook.

What OS does your netbook have, retro?

Kelly Stiver wrote:

What OS does your netbook have, retro?

It's got Windows 7 Starter on it. I think it's a kind of cut down version of Windows 7. Probably ideal for a netbook, however Windows XP should be just fine.