Found an acer aspire one while thrifting out of town, with a suitable power cord, no less. I know they're nothing impressive by today's standards (or even for their own time), but I love these little netbooks. Looks like the most recent stuff is from 2009. Shockingly, the battery holds a charge!

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dissected_gossamer@reddit

The netbook concept was great- small, lightweight, yet full featured laptop. But in reality, the tech just wasn't ready yet. The Intel Atom CPU was aggravatingly underpowered and Windows was a sluggish nightmare on the ones I used.

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NoMusic3987@reddit (OP)

I watched a video recently about the failure of netbooks that pretty much blamed Microsoft and their bloatware for the eventual demise of the netbook, particularly Windows 7 Starter. XP seems to run beuaituflly on it, but I wouldn't trust much beyond that personally. I'm thinking about putting in a SSD just to see how much difference it makes, but it honestly runs fairly well given the inherent limitations.

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MWink64@reddit

I always assumed they died out as a result of the proliferation of tablets.

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NoMusic3987@reddit (OP)

On the laptop front, I think the MacBook Air was the killer due to it's extremely small size (for the time).

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MWink64@reddit

I have some doubts about that. A big part of the appeal of netbooks was that they were generally dirt cheap. The MacBook Air definitely was not.

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dissected_gossamer@reddit

The ones I tried had Windows 7, which everyone at the time said was a beautifully optimized operating system, much more optimized than Vista. I don't know how accurately that narrative reflects reality, but that was the common wisdom for years. Glad to hear XP runs smoothly on it.

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TygerTung@reddit

My eeepc has the very powerful Atom N570 CPU which is dual core running at 1.6 GHz with hyperthreading, so that was pretty alright. Got around 10 years of service out of that one before 2 GB ram was no longer enough.

Still got it, but the body is in pretty rough shape.

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teknosophy_com@reddit

Oh yeah, netbooks are fun, if for nothing else than the nostalgia of the late 2000s. They'd be great to connect to a TV and run emulators on. I get them in from time to time; just sold two to a buddy last week.

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Segacduser@reddit

They are only good for using as OBD2 scanners for your car. Otherwise they are useless

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m5online@reddit

NetBooks were such a big deal when they came out. I have a few. Personally I thought the cheap prices of them were not worth the poor performance you got out of them, but they were a big deal for a few years...

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koechzzzn@reddit

Yeah, I tried it two or three times but they were always unusable. Freezing every other second.

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themikeosguy@reddit

A lot of the time it was due to the extremely slow SSDs they came with. I had an Aspire One and put a really lightweight Linux distro on it, which ran fine apart from disk accesses bringing the thing to a halt...

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NoMusic3987@reddit (OP)

This one has an HDD. I didn't think very many of them had SSDs back in the mid 2000s.

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f2simon@reddit

It was slow mmc memory, comparing to modern sata ssd

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m5online@reddit

Back then the vast vast majority of those netbooks had little 1.8 inch IDE HDDs to keep costs down. Anything solid state back then was extremely expensive and would totally negate the budget conscious concept of the netbook formfactor. I worked on dozens of them at the time and I don't recall ever dealing with one that had any kind of internal solid state storage. But I'm sure they existed, just not widely used.

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f2simon@reddit

I had one , acer aspire one 722 , amd C60 2core. It was nice netbook , until it was broken many times by my father watching YouTube and sleeping with netbook on stomach 🗿

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CRA@reddit

Sad they discontinued Netbooks. I'd buy a modern one any time again. I simply can't work productive with a Tablet. The closest I have is now my beloved ThinkPad X250.

I still have my EeePC 901 (which was the 2nd smallest ever made). Back then it ran great with Windows XP and it was great during studies to have an ultra small mobile PC with me. Being able to throw some measurement values into an Excel sheet and calculate some stuff where others had only a pocket calculator and paper was a huge advantage.

Today I run it with Debian and LXDE with max RAM and an SSD. Unless you want to surf the modern web, it still holds up acceptable.

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MasterKnight48902@reddit

Neat. I used to have the 1002HA with maxed out 2GB of RAM from 2013 to late 2023 as a companion laptop

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jefbenet@reddit

I still have mine and pull it out on occasion to play older games and such when I’m feeling nostalgic. And like yours - mine still hold a pretty decent charge considering its age

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OriginalDecoy@reddit

Ha! I've got one sitting right behind me that looks exactly like that one. I think I installed linux on it... if not, I probably will. I was just thinking about that this weekend.

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NoMusic3987@reddit (OP)

I have linux lite on my other one. I think I'm leaving this one as xp just for the experience. It takes me back!

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b33znutz@reddit

Cool find! And power too, nice! Love my HP mini. Great share!

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nixiebunny@reddit

I still have one of these that I use to program old devices that need XP. It’s a bit sluggish, and I found that it was incapable of running Lego Mindstorms software because too few pixels on the tiny screen! It’s much better with a VGA monitor in dual screen mode.

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requiem2323@reddit

I miss my old Asus EEE PC 1000h. I was constantly swapping Linux distros, exploring and learning. Wish they would bring back netbooks, perfect little laptops.

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Think-Try2819@reddit

Same machine. I would love to pick up a N100 10 inch laptop.

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generiatricx@reddit

look for a wallet.dat file!

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PetahOsiris@reddit

Oh man I loved the netbook trend. I had an aspire one like this through University and it was a great lil machine for note taking. I used to carry like 2 spare batteries but it’d get me through a full day of class plus some.

I think it was the last windows laptop I ran regularly before I switched to MacOS as a daily driver. I slimmed down the windows install and I think managed to upgrade the ram too. It ran remarkably well for what it was.

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OG-Mumen-Rider@reddit

I had tried playing Minecraft on one of these back in 2012 - I could barely get 15 fps all the while it would get so hot there would be rendering artifacts. I ended up drilling holes in the bottom cover in a feeble attempt to improve the cooling

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HerrHauptmann@reddit

sssssssloooooowwwww. horrible max. resolution. Screen colors look washed out. Also, almost no headroom for RAM upgrades.

I have one.

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AudioBabble@reddit

I had one of these... shitty computer, but nice little keyboard!

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Neo9320@reddit

I have 2 of these that I’ve popped Linux on. Great machines

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SaturnFive@reddit

These are good netbooks, they'll run forever with a little maintenance. Nice find

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inigo_montoya@reddit

Looks like a nice keyboard. I'm halfway thinking of getting an old laptop for writing.

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NoMusic3987@reddit (OP)

I havn't tried extensive typing on it, but the little I have done has been a good experience.

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Terrible-Bear3883@reddit

Nice find, I used to have one in my training room to show the class, it had Vista on it and we would turn it on and start a stopwatch, go and have a tea break (15 mins), come back and I'd carry on the training course, then 9 minutes later it would come to the log on screen, it always took 26 minutes to boot to login from cold boot !

I had another identical one and put Ubuntu 9.10 on, it booted in about 60 seconds, fun little machines though.

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NoMusic3987@reddit (OP)

I have a Gateway that feels like essentially the same machine. I put Linux Lite on there (32 bit) and it works reasonably well as an emulation on the go machine. I think I'll keep this one as XP, though.

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