Heeeere’s Amazon, with average 4-star reviews.
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Gateway 10.1” Netbook with Windows 7 Starter [Refurbished] - $259.99 + $5 shipping
1 * Gateway 1.6Ghz, 10.1" Netbook 1GB DDR2, 250GB, 802.11b/g, Webcam, 6 cell, Windows 7 Starter
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This is not a good deal considering one has to buy windows 7 to put into it… it’s only the starter program
Information on WINDOWS 7 STARTER, which is included.
Summary: Other than limiting your ability to change the wallpaper, removing the Windows Media Center (NOT Player), lack of the fancy see-through effect (Aero), and being unable to power more than one monitor at a time, Windows 7 Starter is not limiting for the vast majority of home users, especially home users on a netbook.
The things you read about Starter, like it only running 3 programs, are NOT true.
From Wikipedia
The cost to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium is $79 dollars. It is built into the OS to upgrade - you don’t need to reinstall Windows. It’s called “Windows Anytime Upgrade”
Most of the negative reviews on amazon are due to 30GB “missing” from the hard drive. The naysayers simply did not realize that there is a restore partition on the hard drive that is using up some of the space. So the product rating would be even higher if it were not for this misunderstanding.
For anyone complaining about Win7 Stater, feel free to delete it and install Ubuntu on it. It’s a free, open source operating system that’s fully configurable and should do everything you want, and will probably run better on such humble specs.
I did the same with my eeePC and it runs better than it did before, and is just as useful (if not more) as it was before. Take a look.
Thanks woot! I just bought the Acer with a smaller harddrive and less battery life on Sunday.
I would have bought the Gateway instead of the Acer
I have a new netbook (Toshiba) with Win 7 “starter edition” and it’s fine. Good luck finding a Windows-based netbook (recently released) with any other OS. I don’t see why anyone would need an upgrade.
I wish this one had a 500 GB hard drive & 2 GB in RAM. Anyone have an opinion on the processor?
I got a new HP mini with a 16gb sshd for this price. This may not run quite as quietly, but it sure packs a punch - and runs a lot better than XP, that’s for sure.
I bought one of these a few weeks ago, just got it a couple days or so ago. It’s an impressive machine for it’s size. I did swap the 1GB of DDR2 out for a 2GB stick with no problem at all. The battery life is phenomenal! With the screen brightness turned to minimum (more than adequate in normal room light) it seems to get ~8 hours out of a charge. AMAZING! I attribute this at least partially to the LED display (no power burning inverter to run the display lighting).
In addition, it does a quite admirable job of running the programs I have installed, and the 250GB HDD is not bad at all for something that doesn’t have an optical drive (you don’t get tempted to install a lot of bloatware), and it does have an SD card slot, so you can carry your movies with you in a little pocket holder.
I was looking at getting an Asus netbook (possibly the seashell) but just saw this today, anyone have any recommendations on which one is a better buy?
How many megapixels is the integrated webcam?
It’s a VGA (640x480) 0.3 megapixel webcam. Decent enough for skype and messing around, but don’t expect great results. As a comparison a standard Youtube video is 480x360 so this should be a bit clearer.
What isn’t clear is if this does VGA at 30 or 60 fps, or if it’s limited to 15fps as many cheapo webcams are and only does 30 at 320x240.
The n270 is a fairly standard netbook processor, it is miles ahead of the Z series atom processors in terms of performance.
It is about 1/2 of the performance of a same clocked Pentium M chip from a few years ago.
Don’t expect to be able to do video editing or anything processor intensive on this and you should be fine.
Youtube and Hulu should be fine if you aren’t trying for HD.
EDIT: It will play divx, xvid, and other video formats that are normally used for tv/movie encoding just fine. x264/mkv stuff is possible with CoreAVC up to 720p with minimal stuttering IF you upgrade to 2gb of ram.
Battery life is the shining star for these processors. With a rated battery life of up to 8 hours, and a more realistic “real world” battery life of 6 hours, you can go all day without having to plug in. Perfect for email, word processing, solitare, and web games on the go.
Based on the overall good reviews on every site I could find discussing this netbook, I decided to grab one.
I’ve held off as long as I could in the netbook arena, but the draw was just too much for me this time.
So what is the approx battery life for this? On the Amazon page it says the battery should last about 7 hours, but it doesn’t say what size the battery is.