Free Republic

More than Meets the Eye Alongside the original iPad, Apple sold a keyboard dock for users who wanted to do a lot of typing on their new tablet. The keyboard dock turned the iPad into a mini iMac running iOS. What the iPad keyboard dock lacked however was a pointing device—all navigation still had to be done via the touch screen. As Apple has correctly pointed out in the past, the notebook usage model doesn't work very well if you have to keep reaching across your keyboard to touch the screen. ASUS expands on the idea of a keyboard dock...

Well I usually can figure stuff out myself but am embarrased that I am stumped on this one. My son goes to Edinboro and accidentally compressed the C drive in his HP 1151NR netbook. That's the only drive and had the XP OS on it. Now it won't boot and of course won't recognize C:. I've tried everything I can think of...used ethernet to connect it to our PC while he's home and no go. He does not have an optical drive. Shouldn't there be some way to reset the netbook? Actually LONG AGO I did something similar to a...

I've recentluy been mulling getting a new portable PC, and have been considering getting a Netbook, rather than a notebook. While a netbook is much smaller and lighter for traveling pirposes, I still want to be able to hook it up to a larger monitor, keyboard and mouse at home, and be able to watch movies with a USB connected DVD drive. Looking at the specs of some Netbooks, it appears this can be done as easily as with a full sized notebook. But I find myself wondering, if these Netbooks can handle..basically replacing a Notebook as the central componant...

Fujitsu has launched the "wallet sized" Fujitsu Lifebook UH900 netbook to the Australian market announcing that is available now from distribution partners. Available in three glossy finishes and a 5.6-inch WXGA display, Fujitsu has claimed the unit is less than 2.5cm in thickness, "mimicking" the size of a long wallet. The unit ships with Windows 7 compatibility and supports all Windows-based pages including flash animation and form-filling. It includes a 62GB solid-state drive (SSD) Furthermore, Fujitsu has claimed the unit weighs less than 500g, includes 3.5G wireless capabilities and is powered by the Intel Atom Z530 processor. "The UH900 raises...

Netbook gravy train starts to slow as euphoria fades Netbook shipments have started cooling after witnessing an explosive surge since late last year as customers started realizing its limits and looking for portable and affordable alternatives for full-size laptops. According to Xia Li, vice-president of Lenovo Group, growth in netbook sales during the second half of this year has slowed as consumers have started becoming more rational in their purchases. "Netbook sales surged in the past as consumers bought the product as gifts or as first laptops," he said. But with consumers starting to realize the limits of the products,...

With Chrome OS, Google aims to make the Web the primary platform for software development. Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s plan to release its own operating system based on its Chrome browser is at once audacious and laughable. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Windows represents slightly less than 90% of the personal computer operating system market, a position it has held for years. Google's industry ally, Apple, has managed to steal a few percentage points of market share away from Microsoft in the past twelve years under the singular leadership of CEO Steve Jobs. But Windows remains the dominant operating system, more dominant even...

Small but disruptive Jun 11th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO AND TAIPEI From The Economist print edition Laptops are evolving—and forcing the rest of the computer industry to change IT WAS like waiting for Godot: in the end, the great man did not come. The crowd at Apple’s jamboree in San Francisco this week was visibly disappointed when Steve Jobs, the computer-maker’s legendary chief executive, did not even put in a brief appearance after a six-month medical leave. But another no-show was perhaps more important. Proving many techno-pundits wrong, Apple did not present a “tablet”—a pared-down computer in both size and...

Windows 7 to debut Oct. 22; Google, Oracle make waves with 'netbook' designsSAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Oct. 22 should prove a key date for the brewing competition in the market for netbook computers among players including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and potentially Oracle Corp.Microsoft on Tuesday set the October delivery date for a new version of its Windows operating system, which is designed to help it better exploit the rapidly growing market for netbooks. A Microsoft representative acknowledged that the company plans to announce the October availability date for Windows 7 at a conference in Taiwan on Wednesday. While Microsoft...

Back when the whole netbook thing started, Asus was king of the hill with a focus on netbooks with Linux pre-installed. Since they were kind of popular, it didn't take Microsoft long to start working together with Asus to 'port' Windows XP to the Asus line of netbooks, and with that, to other netbooks as well. The result was that Linux netbooks are now harder to find for many people. While Dell committed itself to Linux on netbooks, Asus has decided to just skip the first date and jump right into bed with Microsoft.

SSDs (solid state drives) are great. They’re shock resistant, consume less power, produce less heat, and have very fast seek times. If you have a computer with an SSD, such as an Eee PC, there are some tweaks you can make to increase performance and extend the life of the disk. The simplest tweak is to mount volumes using the noatime option. By default Linux will write the last accessed time attribute to files. This can reduce the life of your SSD by causing a lot of writes. The noatime mount option turns this off. Open your fstab file:sudo gedit...

Netbooks are a relative newcomer to the world of portable computers. They sit comfortably at the opposite end of the spectrum from the "desktop replacement" notebooks, those laptops with big screens, beefy specs and full-sized keyboards. Netbooks sacrifice optical drives (CD/DVD drives) and have generally modest hardware specifications, smaller screen sizes and shrunken keyboards. They also tend toward smaller hard drive sizes ... oftentimes much, much smaller. What you get in return is a small PC that is truly ultra-portable, weighing less than two pounds in some cases. In other words, a netbook is an ideal travel companion. Is a...

Although Intel's wildly popular Atom processor was originally conceived for mobile Internet devices with an eye toward eventually trickling into smartphones, it quickly caught on with netbooks and has since carved out a sizable chunk of the mobile landscape. The concept of cheap, fast-enough computing soon migrated from portables to the desktop, where it spawned a new class of delightfully small nettop systems. With Atom now available with two physical cores and an economic downturn causing many to tighten their budgets, the nettop looks to have a promising future, especially in cheap, media-centric PCs. Except for one problem: while the...

A little more than a year ago, the computer industry came up with a new category of device: the "netbook." Smaller than an ultra-portable laptop and designed primarily for Web surfing and e-mail, the hope was that these light-duty machines would carve out a new market sector as consumers' second- or even third-tier PCs — the equivalent of the kitchen TV. Ironically, netbooks sales instead took off, thanks to the sluggish economy, and now threaten to cut into the margins of higher-end laptops. The computer industry may have succeeded in unintentionally cannibalizing its own products. The day after market-research group...

Google may have started out with cellphones for their Android platform, but that doesn’t mean they’re limiting their future options. The guys over at VentureBeat have loaded the open-source OS onto an Eee PC 1000 netbook, with a display almost five times the size of the T-Mobile G1, and aside from some initial networking and sound issues Android is now running normally on the ASUS machine. Screen resolution adjusted automatically, and while digging around in the code they came across not only the phone policy but a MID (mobile internet device) policy suggesting that Google are already considering netbooks in...

The sudden explosion in the popularity of netbooks -- portables with 10-inch or smaller screens that are often based around low-power processors and meant for basic Internet use -- has pushed the price of a notebook to as little as $300. Apple can't ignore this, Gottheil claims. But while the Mac maker's chief Steve Jobs has argued that the iPhone is netbook-like in fulfilling many of the same online roles, the researcher believes that the desire for a keyboard ultimately the usefulness of the iPhone for certain software and that something more is necessary. Instead, he and TBR are confident...

Episode One Thanks to their design as appliances, you can get down to useful work straight away with any of the new breed of Linux-based netbooks. But sooner or later, a fair few folk come up against the unfamiliarity of Linux. And, like the legendary tribe of pygmies, you may find yourself jumping up and down in the head-high long grass shouting out the incantation that gave the tribe its name: "We're the Fukarwi." This series is designed to address that cri de coeur. Let's plunge straight into the practicalities by taking a look at Acer's Aspire One - the...