I pretty much despise laptops/notebooks/netbooks/ultrabooks whatever they're calling them these days, but my wife likes to travel (I despise traveling, too-- just call me a grumpy old curmudgeon) and fortunately she doesn't make me go with her. Her Samsung netbook died while she was in Alaska, so she made me get a replacement and send it to her. Of course, before it arrived, her Samsung came back to life (a flaky power switch that has behaved perfectly ever since) so now she has two travel computers.

I am presently in California, taking care of her while she recovers from [elective] back surgery, so I have temporarily inherited the new computer. I am absolutely astonished by how much computing power you can buy for $250 these days.

This computer could never, ever replace my desktop computer. After a few hours or work I have tweaked the Windows 8.1 OS until it is in a frequently usable state, the bootup time is amazingly fast (I don't think it's booting, it's coming out of sleep mode), the screen is really, really good... the keyboard may be the worst I have ever typed on.

Normally I am a 90+ word per minute typist. This keyboard I don't dare go more than about 40. It's as though there is no key-ahead buffer. Go too fast and it drops letters. I have to concentrate on carefully executing each keypress, rather than typing words and sentences. In this short post I have already had to go back and insert missing letters at least 15 times.

But... for $250, how can I complain? It's a full-size keyboard with number pad and dedicated cursor control keys, and so far has been absolutely reliable, no forced reboots or anything.

I wish it had come with MS-Office, but of course at that price it couldn't. I downloaded and installed the Open Office freeware, but it didn't have the power I needed. It couldn't load my Library Index spreadsheet--about 7500 rows by maybe 15 columns, full of all kinds of conditional formatting and macros. The progress bar would get about a third of the way, and then it would lock up. Tried several times. It DID load a subset of the file, when I stripped out half the rows, two-thirds of the columns, and all the formatting. Not useful.

Anyway, I thought I'd ramble on and give my opinion. For the price it is one hell of a computer, but I could never use it as my only computer. Strictly an emergency/travel machine.

tanstaafl.