The second half of my laptop order from System76 arrived today.
I got the Starling Netbook. At a price of about $360 and no mucking with operating systems, it’s a very good buy, in my opinion.
This is from the System76 website. Cute little netbook!
The screen is 10.1 inches, the memory is 1 GB of RAM, the hard drive is 160 gigs, and it has standard wifi and lan networking. The graphics aren’t anything to really write home about, but this is a netbook: a portable device for browsing, blogging, writing and reading. There’s no DVD/CD drive, but that doesn’t bother me, as I have a very nice DVD/CD drive on my much higher powered laptop I wrote about in my last post.
I took some pictures when I unboxed it (not forgetting to grab the camera this time!).
Here’s the packaging. It was well packaged with lots of paper and packing materials so the netbook didn’t move in transit.
More packaging. It came with a power cord (duh) and some documentation relating to where the keys are (like for volume control and brightness).
Here it is set up on my desk. Yes, that is a Microsoft wireless laptop mouse! The computer is very small and convenient to carry around the house.
Battery life is longer than 3 hours. I really haven’t tested it for full capacity yet, but I figure definitely longer than three hours. I’d really like to test it from a full battery.
Onto the keyboard. The keyboard is small. I’ve got to adjust my hands to it every time I switch from my full-sized laptop to the netbook. I wouldn’t recommend this netbook to someone with massive hands, as they wouldn’t be able to type very comfortably on it. Although, if you have massive hands, you might look into a roll-up keyboard or something.
I would recommend this netbook to anyone who is fed up with the offerings from the other netbook manufacturers who are supplying mostly Windows-based netbooks. Granted, it will run MS Office (a very good program in its own right) but it won’t run any of your games or other high-intensity programs. The Starling runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix speedily and handles multiple programs easily.
I was up and running within an hour. I had gwibber and flock installed and configured as well as flash working. I also got firefox 3.5 working on this netbook with no problems.
If you want portability, style, and ease of use, I would recommend this netbook. 5/5 from System76!
