I'm so glad my netbook came with Windows Vista!
I needed a light, cheap computer to take with me to Canada for work. What I really wanted was the exact same laptop I got 4 years ago for about $750, a cheap HP laptop with a 40GB hard drive, 1.6ghz processor and a 750 megs of ram, but in a smaller package (the current one weighs a ton) and for less money. Seeing how fast technology moves, that shouldn't be a problem, should it? AFter all, 4 years prior to that, I paid three times as much for a dell with a smaller screen, half the processor power, a 1/4 the hard drive space and 1/8th the ram.
But cheap computers are hard to come by in Japan. Stores push $2000+ monstrosity laptops with HD screens, and almost seem to deliberately not stock the low-end computers that dominate the market in the US. It's true netbooks have introduced a new, low-end market, but they seem like overkill on the form factor end of things. How much work can you really get done with a ten inch screen and a 5-centimeter track pad?
I went to Yodobashi camera and finally found a "Dell mini" which is halfway between a budget notebook and a netbook. It has a 12" screen, big for a netbook, a 1.33 processor, a 60GB hard drive, and 1GB of ram. In other words, it's about what I got for 750 4 years ago, but small and light...about what I was looking for going in the store.
But for how much? The one with XP was $600, a bit out of my price range. But there was an otherwise identical notebook with Windows Vista which was $400, making it easily the cheapest in the store. I asked the clerk if I could just get that one without Vista, and he told me Vista was the whole reason it was so cheap. They couldn't sell any.
I told him I would take my chances and got it. It was easy to see why no-one wanted it- the thing barely moved. Just turning it on ate up close to 80% of the RAM. So I wiped it clean with a copy of XP from my old computer and now it works great.
So in the end, Vista knocked the price of my computer down by a third. Thanks, Microsoft! Vista rules!
5 comments:
Sad! I love Vista.
Glad that things worked out for you, though!
I've met a few people that really like it, but I don't get it...I mean the features are good and all, but it runs at about half the speed of XP on the same computer!
Microsoft is giving away their new OS Windows 7 for free until june 2010 though, and I put it on my mac and its really good and fast. So maybe I'm starting to change my opinion of microsoft.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
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hahaha yeah, have you seen that new super sexy super slim sony vaio netbook (that you're not supposed to call a "netbook"?). Actually, despite being a mac guy i was seriously tempted by that (even given its 8man en price) until i saw that it was only available with Vista.... which killed all my desire for it. Seriously, as you said, just the simple act of turning it on sucked up about 80% of the RAM and doing anything (even something like opening a folder) caused you to stare a stupid spinning cursor for an eternity.
Microsoft Vista is probably the world's first "Anti-Brand" ever - seeing that on a product counts as a detriment, not a boon. They probably ought to hide that fact on any and all advertising they do for PCs from now on haha.
that having been said, i dunno if you've gone recently or not, but at least here in Kanto the big shops like Yodobashi Camera and Bic Camera stock tons of cheap netbook, starting at around 3man en and up (though most hover around the 6 man en range)
Wow, we might get bigger places, but we miss out on those insane electronics deals down here! When people from here go to tokyo and see a big bin of 2GB flash drives for like, 800 yen each they bug out.
I think Windows Vista is a product of Apple marketing. Its like everything that's stereotypically wrong with windows cramped up to 11. But I said it to Kimchi and I'll say it again, Windows 7 is pretty tight! I heard there's going to be a netbook configuration for it. I give them credit just for getting it down to that kind of size.
I'd wait on the vaio...pretty soon apple will have a keyboardless tablet netbook that looks like 3 iphones stuck together for about the same price.
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