Ultrabooks

[mesh control]

I have most of my notes and textbooks on my laptop, however, it's too large to carry around in my backpack all day at school and I want something smaller.

Looking at things like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834312448 [www.newegg.com] »
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834680439 [www.newegg.com] »
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834230785 [www.newegg.com] »

Any pro-tips?

[shmuppyLove]

$1000?

Protip: Get a tablet instead

[moh]

$1000?

pay some guy to be your personal bitch who carries your shit.

[mesh control]

Seriously?
(I'm really ignorant about tablets.)

What freedoms would be cut off if I went the tablet route? Don't like being bound to tablet-esque OS functionality.

[shmuppyLove]

Well yeah, tablets obviously don't have a full OS on them like an ultrabook would.

IDK, ultrabooks seem like a gimmick to me to sell you an underpowered, cut-down laptop at a premium price, just because it's thin and light.

I think you'd get much better bang for your buck from a 13"

Here's a Dell for half the price
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834200702

Or I see some Vaios there with i5 processors, 7200rpm hard drives and DVD drive for around $800 that would kick an ultrabook up and down the block.

[mesh control]

7200rpm hard drives and DVD drive

The idea of me getting a ultrabook would be to cut out the fat, like a dvd drive or non-flash memory.

I'd still be using my normal laptop at home (lenovo y480 i7@2.4GHz), so my approach is looking for something thin and light, that I can throw in my back pack with some notebooks and not be burdened carrying it all day at school.

[Udderdude]

Why not just get a Netbook? They're insanely cheap these days.

[mesh control]

I forgot they exist. whoops.

(frankly, I'm looking at this like retail therapy)

[Vexorg]

I wouldn't wish a Netbook on my worst enemy. The things are so stripped down that they border on being useless, which is basically what you get when your first priority is designing something to be cheap. Tablets are great for light tasks like web surfing and watching videos, but most are all but useless when it comes to doing actual productive work.

[Udderdude]

It seems that's all he's using it for.

And yeah, Netbooks have the equivalent power of a Pentium 4 from 2001. D:

But if you run stripped down XP, it can perform fine and can even run most MAME games with no framerate issues.

[gct]

No, don't get a netbook. The fad is over because they are pretty much outclassed by tablets on the portability, and performance by even the lowest-end notebooks.

Get a thin & light notebook that isn't an ultrabook. Optical drive is indeed unnecessary bulk - you can get two USB opticals to leave at home and at work. Go for something like a 13.3" with a proper non-nerfed CPU and it should be good for a while. I have an Acer TimelineX 3830TG, suped up to Hell with an i7, 750GB WD Black, and 8GB RAM. I use it as my main work computer and transport it every day. I usually use it docked to a monitor and keyboard at a desk, but for my needs the size is perfect - light enough for transport but large enough to be productive as as standalone unit. Most importantly of all, it has enough horsepower for what I need to do with it.

[Moniker]

For school purposes, where basically all you need is Office, a browser, and a pdf reader, a netbook is the way to go. My sister used the same one all through college. (I prefer pen & paper, myself.) It's about the same size & weight as a tablet, with the bonus of an actual keyboard.

[antron]

Get an Asus touchscreen 12" 3lb i3/5 for ~$500

[mesh control]

Thanks for the input, everyone.
I'm probably going to sleep on it and see if I really do need one or not.
Or if I'm really just keen on spending my tax rebate. :p

[Udderdude]

If you do go with a Netbook, I highly reccomend wiping it if it comes with Windows 7, and replace it with XP. Windows 7 runs like crap on 1 GB RAM.

[cools]

Get a VAIO Z.

[Ed Oscuro]

For school purposes, where basically all you need is LibreOffice, a browser, and a pdf reader, a netbook is the way to go.

Since Firefox version 19 was released, now you don't even need a separate PDF reader for most purposes.

LibreOffice 4.X (4.1 is coming around the beginning of the coming month, about March 4th) is adding a note-appending feature for PDFs. I don't know how well it works yet (holding off on the update for the moment) but if it works well I won't see any reason to hold onto Reader XI except for strange compatibility or browser memory saving (my case, actually...) purposes.

[Moniker]

LibreOffice 4.X (4.1 is coming around the beginning of the coming month, about March 4th) is adding a note-appending feature for PDFs. I don't know how well it works yet (holding off on the update for the moment) but if it works well I won't see any reason to hold onto Reader XI except for strange compatibility or browser memory saving (my case, actually...) purposes.

By the by, how does LibreOffice compare to OpenOffice.org? I've been using the latter for awhile now, chiefly for word processing; lots of features and it has decent MSOffice compatibility, although the UI leaves much to be desired.

[mesh control]

I did buy something. . . A 11" Macbbook Air. Hardware is exactly what I was looking for; however, I'm currently wiping OSX off of it (Ok, partitioning most of it off for Ubuntu).

People actually buy Mac products for this OS? What the fuck. I haven't used Mac OS since these monsters were created:


A 13" laptop is still to big to throw in my backpack every day. I have a bunch of field guides I always carry with me, and some other shit.
I already have a 14" laptop, that's fixated on my desk, which works just fine. It's just a pain in the ass to carry it 12 hours at school, where I tend to do most of my homework/studying. I hate my apartment, too. The less time I'm here, the better.
I also hate tablets. My phone is a fucking tablet and all I use that for is snapchat.
Hate everything.

NOW YOU MIGHT BE SAYING: HEY YO MESH WHY THE FUCK DID YOU BUY THIS SHIT LOL YR GONNA REGRET IT
MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY.
$$$ tax rebate and retail therapy $$$

[Ed Oscuro]

LibreOffice 4.X (4.1 is coming around the beginning of the coming month, about March 4th) is adding a note-appending feature for PDFs. I don't know how well it works yet (holding off on the update for the moment) but if it works well I won't see any reason to hold onto Reader XI except for strange compatibility or browser memory saving (my case, actually...) purposes.

By the by, how does LibreOffice compare to OpenOffice.org? I've been using the latter for awhile now, chiefly for word processing; lots of features and it has decent MSOffice compatibility, although the UI leaves much to be desired.

Politics: LibreOffice is the fork where all the OpenOffice devs went after somebody (Oracle, I think...almost said "Sun") threw a hissy fit over The Document Foundation's creation to ensure self-governance by the community. Told any OO board members who had joined TDF to quit and all that. After that, the previous owner dumped the OO code onto Apache, who started an "incubation" process which further delayed any work on it for at least a year now. They shouldn't have bothered. As far as I know nobody has complained about TDF's way of running things. Their release schedule tracking is as good or better than anything OO had / has. I'm not sure if OO is finally about to release a new version; I stopped tracking that late last year.

OO can benefit from code written for LO but as far as I'm concerned OO is dead and LO is its replacement.