A love hate relationship with my Samsung NC20 Netbook
/I love my Samsung NC20 Netbook - I love it for its great 12 inch screen and full size keyboard that allow me to type articles like this during tedious Travelodge stays with consummate ease.
However, in a way, I hate it for the same reasons - because although fairly lightweight, I adored the dinky size of my previous Advent 10 inch Netbook. I also find the following things frustrating:
a.. The screen seems washed out to me - the colours are not saturated enough at what I consider normal viewing angles. And it's too bright - or more correctly doesn't go dim enough for me when working in dark conditions (which would save battery power).
b.. The track-pad is very annoying - it regularly seems to switch to "scroll mode" with the lightest of touches, even when your finger is not on the "scroll region" on the right hand side.
c.. The speakers are woeful.
d.. I'm not convinced by the Via Nano processor. The machine regularly runs at 100%, thus gets hot and canes the battery life. And I've had trouble ever getting BBC iPlayer to run smoothly. It's just about bearable with the colour depth set to 16 bits and performance set to max. And again, this canes the battery life.
e.. Battery life: if you are doing very little you may squeeze the claimed 4 - 6 hours out of it - but anything multimedia and not a chance..
f.. The Samsung Recovery system - which claims a minimum 25Gb of your hard disk for what seems to me very little use. Backing up your machine to the same physical disk seems almost pointless. If the disk fails or the machine is stolen, then I'm likely to end up data-less regardless. It might possibly save you if some key disk sectors get corrupted, but that's about all.
g.. Pre-installed Macafee security. Sheesh, this thing just guzzles resources. Uninstall it as soon as you can, and use something free like Avast.
h.. There's no firewire port. So although in principle I could throw together a few MovieMaker movies when I have my camcorder along with me, I can't transfer the material.
i.. There are no office tools. Although basic, at least the Advent came with Microsoft Works.
j.. Even though i upgraded to 2Gb memory, it doesn't really seem to have made a significant difference.
On the plus side i like that you can extend the desktop onto an external monitor (i.e. basically see two displays).
So - I suppose it does what it says on the tin, but it doesn't make me grin.