my very first netbook 900HA

[hd0642]

im a kid that grew up in the early 80's and have come a long way with the computer age, it all started for me back in '82, i think it was, with my commodore 64 with big 5 1/4" floppy drive and cadillac like external modem that just plugged into an ordinary TV set. i think it set my parents back $1000 or so. that thing literally blew the doors off the IBM's back then in terms of gaming and graphics. ive gone through maybee 4 desktops and 2 laptops and recently just picked up my very first netbook and asus 900HA.

when i started shopping i couldnt decide between a 9" or 10" but im glad i went with the more compact 9", this little thing is simply amazing with its portability. i also could not decide on asus, acer, lenovo, dell, etc but settled on the asus for the main reason of the ability to easily upgrade the RAM with just the removal of a couple of screws. the lenovo wasn't upgradable and the acer had to practicaly be dismantled to get to the RAM. the 1.6Ghz atom is plenty powerfull for on the go applications but the video is slightly choppy, i still have my most recent laptop for a home machine. i managed to snag it for $230 shipped and it is by far the least expensive computer ive ever had.

im speechless as to how the computer has come along, i guess it just shows my real age - anyways nice place you all have here and i hope to contribute and pick brains as well.

[ThisIsNot]

Have fun with your netbook.

Ah, I remember the old days of computers and gaming. I was born in 1984 (on August 26th) but adapted to technology rather quickly. I remember having an old Apple IIe model and my first console was an NES (the original NES, not the top-loader that was released later). I had a launch NES too as it came with Robby The Robot, he never worked though. My friends were jealous of my NES and my computer. We had the model that came with an Apple printer (one of those old gray scale printers that used paper with those tear off edges), a joystick, a two button mouse (no application used it though), and two 5.25" floppy drives. I could easily copy games and programs.

I look at the technology out now and am amazed. My Xbox 360 has a triple-core processor and each core supports two streams of data at once (it is IBM's answer to Intel's hyper-threading technology). Each core operates at 3.2GHz and the OS is a 64-bit environment. The GPU also has 48 pipelines with embedded RAM and mine came with a 120GB hard drive all for $350. People's heads would literally explode if they were to see that back in the day. PC's have come a really long way as well. My old Apple IIe takes up more space than my current desktop (which runs two AMD Phenom X4 processors, that is 8 effective cores for processing and 8GB of RAM) and its 25" monitor.

I also have a netbook on order from HP that can playback full 1080p videos. All of that in a package that takes up the same amount of space as the average 8.9" netbook. Just wait until this type of "next generation" hardware gets used by other computer manufacturers. The Nvidia ION platform (which is basically a GeForce 9400M GPU with the option of using Nvidia's dual-core processor) should really push things along as it too can playback full 1080p video while consuming less power than what Intel plans on releasing (they will basically re-badge their older GMA 4500MHD IGP when they embed it with a next generation Atom processor).

Edit: welcome to the forums too. Chris's reviews are pretty in-depth and you will find him replying to posts on the forums. Not very many websites have their creator and organizer hanging around like that.