

Ask HN: Hackers Netbook? - csuper

Does anyone have a favorite?  Why?
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jamess
I have an eeepc, but you couldn't do any serious amount of work on it. I'm not
so concerned about the horsepower (if your software is so bloated it doesn't
run at speed on an eeepc, which is way faster than my main development machine
was only 4-5 years ago, you're doing it wrong.)

The main problem is the screen real estate and keyboard size. I just can't
type at speed on the eee, I keep hitting all the wrong keys and it gets very
frustrating. It's fine for the odd email, but no way could I crank out the
code on it. The screen is also too small. My main laptop has a nice widescreen
where I typically have 2/3rds IDE and 1/3rd documentation/consoles. Not
possible on 7-8" screens.

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loglaunch
I have a dell mini 9, its great for college and checking email. Also good for
light web browsing. Its not great for programming because the keyboard is a
bit to small.

It works great with the new "cloud" web apps like dropbox and google docs
offline.

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shutter
Nah. Netbooks don't have enough CPU cycles or pixels to keep up.

Granted, I haven't owned one, but I do more than browse the internet. Netbooks
typically can't provide enough horsepower to run all of the programs I like to
run at the same time.

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medearis
I've got a mid-high end HP notebook, which I've run with some permutation of
XP, Vista and Ubuntu for the last year. Its treated me fairly well as far as
being rugged, with a nice big monitor. It is a bit heavy....

What sorts of stuff are you running? My experience with high-end notebooks
these days is that they can run basically anything -- fairly high end games,
as many desktop apps as you can download, even Matlab runs pretty well on my
laptop. So long as you aren't hosting a serious website or doing some crazy
data analytics AI stuff, I think you're fine.

~~~
eru
Running linear program solvers or mixed integer program solvers also eats a
lot of resources.

