There’s a new kid on the block and he’s much smaller than the rest! What am I on about? ‘Mini’ or ‘ultra portable’ laptops, thats what. For some time I have been looking to buy a laptop to use whilst visiting customers or travelling, because the laptop I use currently for this purpose is simply too bulky and slow to be used efficiently in this manner.
There are now quite a few on the market and they are MUCH cheaper than you would think, in fact a friend recently asked what she could buy for her son, who was going off to college, her main requirement was that it should be indestructible! I said that it might be cheaper, in the long run, to resign herself to buying several of these mini laptops rather than one “tough” laptop, given she could buy about 10 of the mini laptops for the price of one ‘tough’ laptop!
The specification of each mini laptop currently on the market is pretty similar as they tend to all come with either a 9″ or 10″ screen, a small keyboard (however it’s still very usable, this article is being typed using it), a built in web cam, wireless connectivity, multiple USB connections and usually some sort of media card reader – all built into the tiny case.They tend to come with either Windows XP or Linux (an alternative, free, operating system), and usually 512Mb of memory. My advice would be to go for the Windows version as it generally won’t give you any compatibility issues with any current hardware you have and it’s not that much more expensive. I would also advise upgrading the memory – putting an extra 1 GB of RAM in shouldn’t cost the earth and it will make a big difference to the performance of the laptop.I decided to buy the Acer Aspire One, but it was bad timing as Dell announced the release of the Inspiron Mini 5 days later and it’s a smidgen better (i.e. it has twice the RAM of the Acer and built in BlueTooth and a larger hard drive) – never the less I am very impressed with my purchase.The other option was the Asus EEEPC, to be honest there was not much to choose between all of them in terms of price, I paid 299€ for mine and then paid a little extra to upgrade the RAM and of course I already had my own copy of Windows to put on it, not bad really.I’ve been using it now for a couple of months and I have to say that I am very impressed, the battery lasts for around 2 hours helped by its Intel Atom low power usage processor – which is pretty impressive for a laptop that is easily half the size of my last one, it weighs next to nothing (less than 1 kilo) and is only about an inch wider than the A4 page you are reading now.Of course as a Dell reseller we would love to sell you what Dell offer, however, as usual, feel free to ring us to talk about any of the models that I have mentioned, we will give you free impartial advice on all of them. If you would like the web site addresses of each of the models mentioned in this months article then just drop me an email (address opposite).