Netbook Memory Upgrade

imageI decided this week that I would make the only simple upgrade to my netbook and double the memory it has in it from 1gb to 2gb. For this I bought a stick of memory from the ever reliable Crucial for £12.64 delivered. It arrived within a couple of days of ordering and took less than 10 minutes to install (full instructions can be found here).

You can see in the picture on the left the memory in place between the fan and the hard drive. Since then I haven’t had much of an opportunity to have a … Read the rest

Getting Software onto your Netbook

A friend of mine recently bought a netbook and was wondering how he could install software onto it that he had on CD.

There are a number of ways to achieve this: buy an external usb-CD/DVD drive to plug in, share the disk out from another machine and access across a network or create an image of the disk and transfer this to the netbook.

The former is probably the simplest solution but requires an additional outlay which, quite frankly, is probably not justifiable for the small number of times that you are going to have to do it. It … Read the rest

Netbook v3

imageSo I am in the market for a new Netbook (some would ask when am I not in the market for a new gadget). This would be my third, therefore I think that you can safely say that I am a convert to the form factor.

There have already been two iterations of Netbooks. Version 1 was the original Asus Eee PC 701 device that introduced the Netbook to the world. This had a 7" screen and ran a specially customised Linux OS. I had one of these and loved it but found Linux to be hard work.

The … Read the rest

Moblin – the Netbook OS

ScreenshotI have been playing around with a new OS interface that is optimised for netbooks and specifically those running on the Intel Atom processor, which is most of them. Moblin has a simplistic and very appealing interface that quickly gives you access to all the functionality that you are likely to need from a Netbook. This means that web browsing, IM and Twitter are all quickly accessible from a menu bar at the top of the screen. Panels on the “home” page present information and quick links to other areas such as media.

It looks fantastic, as you can see … Read the rest

Netbook as a eReader

imageAlways on the lookout for ways to extract the most from my Netbook and having eyed up the Sony’s eReader in Waterstones I thought I would see whether the former could act as the latter.

eBooks are all the rage at the moment, particularly in the states where Amazon’s Kindle seems to be doing a roaring trade. I have to say that I am not a particularly big reader and so to have the ability to carry and number of books around and dip in and out what the mood takes me appeals to me. Also I carry my netbook … Read the rest