More on the NB205 (picked one up last week)

[mike-y]

Hi, just thought I'd post about the NB205, since I picked one up last week.

After some research, and some hands-on testing at the local Best Buy, I decided on the NB205 (in blue). The biggest features for me were the 9 hr battery, and the keyboard. I tried all the netbooks at BB, and just about all of them had cheap, flimsy feeling keyboards. Two of them (gateway and samsung) had broken keys.

I originally wanted the new seashell asus, but I didn't like the keyboard. Almost got a 1000HE that my friend has (has chicklet style keyboard), but the toshiba won me over after using it for a bit.

Anyway, hardware wise, it isn't anything special, but I do like the aesthetics and build quality, which is very good, and overall, it feels like a solid product.

Now lets get to the performance and software. This thing came LOADED with bloatware. We are talking 55 running processes after boot. That is crazy for an XP system, let alone XP on a netbook. So I had to spend some time going through all the bundled utilities and my usual windows tweeking.

I ended up uninstalling or disabling most of the toshiba utilities. I did keep the power profile manager and the hard drive protection utility though. Then I went through all the startup entries and processes, and disabled or set to manual everything that I didn't need.

In the end, the machine is down to 25 running processes after boot. The machine boots up noticeably faster now and feels more responsive overall. I do have 2gb of ram on the way, which should make it even better.

the first night I had the netbook, I was used it for 6 hours on the "normal" power profile (while I was performing the tweeks and installing/uninstalling software), and still had 25% battery life left when I shut it down for the night. So so far, I am very pleased with it.