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What a strange coincidence, I was just looking at an old Aspire ZG5 that was sitting in a box of old laptops I've been hoarding, and thought to myself that it w

What a strange coincidence, I was just looking at an old Aspire ZG5 that was sitting in a box of old laptops I've been hoarding, and thought to myself that it was a cool form factor too bad it's so ridiculously underpowered to be useful for anything. I don't think I'll be doing this, nor, as I briefly considered, trying to wedge a raspberry pi in the case. Cute machine though.

folkrav 4y ago
Netbooks were pretty cool as far as form factor went, but indeed, they were mostly utterly useless, often running clocked down single-core Atom chips...
- cestith 4y ago
  I used to see a lot of them in conferences where college students or industry folks had them for note taking and had a bigger, bulkier, more powerful computer elsewhere. As a primary computer they were lacking, but as a second one they were cheap and easily mobile.
  - folkrav 4y ago
    The tiny keyboard combined with my oversized hands made it really hard for me to justify as a note taking tool haha. But yeah, I definitely can see them being used for this purpose. Especially since the laptops of that era weren't particularly lightweight either.
smileybarry 4y ago
I used an extremely weak Acer netbook — the kind that shipped with Windows XP and still slowed down — as an Ubuntu home server and it worked surprisingly well. Apt didn’t mind the small, slow hard drive and everything seemed to actually run relatively fast. (I guess it just really hated drawing a GUI?) It was mostly a printer server, serving CUPS for a USB-only printer, but it did its job well for years and years. Plus the battery had an upside of serving as a UPS, heh. But I did learn the hard way that they’re really not meant to run like that: the fan became increasingly noisy until it sounded like a car ignition, and the heat (when the fan was working fine!) managed to slowly wear out the membrane keyboard, killing more and more keys, making in-person debugging kinda difficult. But it was really cool. And I still have its more performant cousin Asus netbook somewhere!

folkrav 4y ago

Netbooks were pretty cool as far as form factor went, but indeed, they were mostly utterly useless, often running clocked down single-core Atom chips...

cestith 4y ago
I used to see a lot of them in conferences where college students or industry folks had them for note taking and had a bigger, bulkier, more powerful computer elsewhere. As a primary computer they were lacking, but as a second one they were cheap and easily mobile.
- folkrav 4y ago
  The tiny keyboard combined with my oversized hands made it really hard for me to justify as a note taking tool haha. But yeah, I definitely can see them being used for this purpose. Especially since the laptops of that era weren't particularly lightweight either.

smileybarry 4y ago

I used an extremely weak Acer netbook — the kind that shipped with Windows XP and still slowed down — as an Ubuntu home server and it worked surprisingly well. Apt didn’t mind the small, slow hard drive and everything seemed to actually run relatively fast. (I guess it just really hated drawing a GUI?) It was mostly a printer server, serving CUPS for a USB-only printer, but it did its job well for years and years. Plus the battery had an upside of serving as a UPS, heh. But I did learn the hard way that they’re really not meant to run like that: the fan became increasingly noisy until it sounded like a car ignition, and the heat (when the fan was working fine!) managed to slowly wear out the membrane keyboard, killing more and more keys, making in-person debugging kinda difficult. But it was really cool. And I still have its more performant cousin Asus netbook somewhere!