Netbooks Cannot Fly

A quick post from the great southwest. We are having simply a ton of fun down in the desert. Weather is perfect. Swimming, golfing, working out, seeing the sites, doing some photography. All in all, life does not get much better than this.

Except for Windows 7 Starter Edition.

I had packed my little Acer netbook — which runs Ubuntu — into checked luggage. I thought it would be okay. But netbooks cannot fly. At least not this one. When I took it out of the protective case, it had died. A paperweight.

Unfortunately, with all of the photography work, I have to store the images somewhere. And I can use really, really expensive portable storage devices for photography or I can use a cheap netbook with a portable hard disk.

I picked up a nifty little netbook from a Best Buy here in Arizona. A Toshiba NB255 netbook.

Sadly, it runs Windows 7 Starter Edition. What a mess. Aside from being crippled — unable to even change the wallpaper on the desktop — it dies on anything other than basic web browsing. I know. It is a netbook. It is not supposed to be a performance machine.

To load and preview a 25MB RAW image takes well over a minute under Windows 7 Starter Edition. To do the same task on the old machine — which was a lower performing machine — took less than a few seconds under Ubuntu.

I do not have time to put down Ubuntu on this box until I get back home. Although I have learned two things: do not pack netbooks and do not run Windows 7 Starter Edition on a netbook.