What's The Perfect Balance For a Budget Laptop?

cheapbob writes "Recently HP officially unveiled a budget ultraportable laptop aimed to compete with the likes of Asus Eee PC. According to Compal, one of Dell's assemblers, Dell is also going to enter the budget ultra-portable market soon. All of these devices lack many of the features associated with larger-sized laptops, such as optical drives and large amounts of storage space, yet demand for them is very high. Initial reviews of these devices unsurprisingly expose them to be underpowered and lacklustre. What's the appeal? What do you think is the perfect balance of features and price point for a budget laptop?"

Re:I don't like the direction they're taking

[Toonol]

I know some people do care, but for me thickness has about as much bearing on my choice as the thing's color.

And it's bad form, I know, but I'm replying to myself in the hopes of preempting all the dirty jokes making fun of what I said.

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

[AuMatar]

No, we just wonder why the hell you commute so much. I'd never take a job that required me to waste 4 hours of my life daily just going to and from it.

Re:depends on your salary

[Corwn of Amber]

ONE hour to tweak a Linux distro as tight as MacOSX? Your time is worth much, much more than $1300 an hour. Your time could make SuSE replace Apple. Yeah, 15% market share in a year, that's how much for the Messiah who figured out how to configure the distro Just Right?

That everything works? I mean EVERYTHING. Temperature sensors and webcam and all... No, you lie. No one can do that. In under a year? No, you said under one hour. YEAH RIGHT.

Re:light and cheap

[CSMatt]

No, it's not. The Asus eee suck at web broswing I'm typing this from a MacBook and its 1280px horizontal size is NOT ENOUGH for some sites. So, a screen that's 800px wide, for web surfing? They're CRAZY.

1. Invent time machine.
2. Go back 8 years.
3. Use eeePC when Web pages were designed for 800x600 screens.

Oh, and

4. ???
5. Profit.

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

[Reality Master 201]

Natürlich ist es besser in Deutschland zu leben. Leider bin ich Amerikaner.

Budget

[SpaghettiPattern]

The perfect balance for a budget laptop definitely is a large budget.

Re:light and cheap

[artanis00]

No no, you got it wrong. The correct steps are:
1) Receive eeePC & Use eeePC when webpages were for 800x600.
2) Reverse engineer
3) Profit!
4) ???
4) Build time machine
5) Build eeePC
6) Send eeePC back in time eight years.

Re:OLPC

[kirbysuperstar]

Oh, I digress for a bad joke.

Ah, don't worry, it was ARMless.

Re:The Appeal?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need a computer at all to do those things.

Back in MY day, we did those things with paper, pencil, and pigeons! And we LIKED it that way! A nibble and a byte were what you did to your PENCIL! Data dumps were what you avoided from the pigeons - never mind you about packet storms! Kids these days and your computers. I tell you, the 'web was much better when it was ORGANIC.

Easiest way to achieve balance:

[csoto]

Put the center of mass nearest the center of the laptop!

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

[megaditto]

You know all those people typing IANAL?

It's not that they aren't lawers, it's the damn slashdot hiding Unicode character 2665 in their posts.

Allow me to introduce you

[commodoresloat]

to RFC 1149 [ietf.org].

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

[I don't want to spen]

So who's IAN and why does he 'heart' AL?

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

[IAN]

So who's IAN

That would be me...

and why does he 'heart' AL?

Beats me.

Re:4 hours commuting a day...

[Provocateur]

He's the driver. Leave him alone, you insensitive clod!