I Love My Netbook, I Hate My Netbook

I purchased an Acer Aspire One D150 about two months ago. it is the newer 10.1" model. I upped the memory to 2GB and installed Windows 7 beta 7000 on it. I have been using it as my primary personal machine. Before that, I used a Dell Precision M65, which is a hoss of a machine. 15" WUXGA wide screen, dual core 2.somethingorother MHz processor, 4GB of RAM and it has Vista ultimate. The problem with the Dell is it is heavy and large. It is a great desktop machine, but horrible for trips and downright miserable for using at the coffee shop or trying to put on your lap.

So, for $349, I picked up an Aspire One, mainly for blogging and messing around with. Of course, since this is now my primary travel machine, especially for personal trips, I loaded up enough stuff that I can manage to do a modicum of work on it without bringing the Dell with me for the short trips.

So, that meant the Zune desktop software, Windows Mobile Device Center, Office 2007 and Microsoft Money. With that software, and the built-in Remote Desktop software in Windows 7, I can get all of my personal and most of my professional work done. Using Access on this machine is next to useless though. Performance isn't great of course, but the screen is just too small. I am used to the 1920x1200 on the Dell. Stepping down to 1024x600 is brutal in an app like Access. But that is ok, I didn't buy it to run Access, just to use it sparingly vs lugging the Dell with me.

But man, it can seriously be slow. I have a TiVo at home (actually, 3 of them) that I use to record TV shows. 99% of the time, I watch the shows on my TV, but when traveling, I will often want to watch them on my Zune. So, on my Dell, I have the TiVo desktop software that I use to transfer shows from the TiVos to the Dell. I then use Spb's Mobile DVD software to convert that show to a 320x240 WMV video that works well on a Pocket PC. Not so much on the Zune though. The TiVo->WMV conversion takes about 7-12 minutes per hour on the Dell, depending on the recording quality. It needs a second conversion to work on the Zune, which the Zune software does. It takes about 10-12 minutes for the Dell to do this, but can take 45-60 minutes for my Acer to do the same task!

I haven't figured out how to do the conversion on the Dell yet then transfer the Zune-ready video to my Acer. I can't dock the Zune with the dell because it is only an 8GB device, which is fine most of the time. When traveling though, I may want to carry 2-3GB of shows with me and I only have 1GB free. That means periodic syncing while charging to copy over new shows, at the slow slow speed of 1 show per hour on average.

Sometimes I wish I had opted for a more powerful device, but then again, this is only $350 and serves my needs quite well for most of the rest of what I wanted it for. Knowing what I know now, I'd very likely make the same decision. More speed isn't worth the extra weight, cost and curtailed battery life.