How's Your Day? Archives

next question: my wife and I got to talking about a replacement computer. I told her about the sites recommended by Jim and other HYD members. It looks like a netbook would suit us best.

I've looked at Asus netbooks and I really like them.

I do not want to get one through our cell phone company. The machine might come "free" but the service package would kill our bank acct.

My question is this- what are some reputable sites that sell cheap and reconditioned netbooks? There are a lot of sketchy sites out there and it's really hard to separate the good from the bad.

 

I like my wife's ASUS netbook.. If you just want online and fast, the Expressgate (built in Linux) will get you up and online very fast. It runs Windows fine as well.

I am sure that somebody has mentioned it; however, in case it was never pointed out... Netbooks do not usually come with optical drives. So if you want to use a CD/DVD with one, you will need an external drive. However, those are pretty easy to get and you just plug them into a USB port and you are good to go.

Hopefully somebody can; however, I can't answer your question. I usually buy computers piece by piece and haven't dealt with any reconditioned notebook sales. I do a lot of purchasing through Newegg and Tigerdirect. Woot has some decent looking reconditioned netbooks coming up now and then; however, that is a random thing for when they appear. With back to school sales you might be able to get a NEW netbook for as cheap as a reconditioned netbook that is slightly older on another site.

 

Before I bought a reconditioned one, I'd check Walmart. If they have an emachines 250-1162, for under $250 it's a great way to go. It's really built by Acer, and the specs are pretty good. It's my primary computer for home use, and I love it. Comes with win7 starter, which is surprisingly decent. Just my 2cents.

 

:happy108
of course, since I don't have cable or satellite, I'll be waiting to get the recorded media from my parents so I can watch it


As far as netbooks, the discount on refurbished is so small, might as well get new.

The Asus models are good, and I like my Acer. Micah's emachine's netbook is basically an Acer with different body - think Chevy and GMC trucks - so that could be a good way to go.

 

Point of clarification:

The body is actually the same, different stickers. The specs are just a tad lower in some areas, higher in others. N270 atom processor, 1g memory, 250g HDD, and 3cell Li-ion battery--the true acer, for about $50 more has the same processor, same ram, smaller HDD, and 6 cell battery, IIRC.

 

Oh, this is cool.

 

that is quite cool

 

yup! looks great; however, when I tried to download it the .4 KB/s time was gonna take 10 days. Ugh! I will have to bookmark it and try it again later.

 

update on the computer: I think it's dead, Jim.

The hard drive has lots of spots it can't read, either due to physical damage or scrambled data. The fan isn't working right- the diagnostics say it at something like half speed. And the real kicker- the cd/ dvd drive isn't working. The diagnostics say it's all right, but it won't even check a cd. The cost of actually repairing it is far more than buying a new netbook.

I know that netbooks don't come with optical drives. We hardly ever used the one on our current laptop. I figure we can either pick up an external if we need one, or somebody somewhere will offer the necessary data for download or on a usb card or something like that.

 

Hmmmm.. Can you get to the BIOS? If you can get the BIOS to boot to USB you can still boot a version of Linux off a USB drive and then try to grab those family pics and your documents. I would guess that with the condition your laptop is Puppy linux might be your best bet. Micah works enough with Puppy Linux he probably knows the easiest way to get a USB boot drive made for Puppy.

 

you know, I think I could do this. I can get to the setup and I can direct the computer to boot from a usb drive. The trick would be teaching me to make the boot drive.

Once I've done that, would it be possible to format the drive from the linux boot disk? I like my privacy.

 

You should be able to. I don't know Puppy Linux that well but if you can get to the drive to pull pics off of it, you should be able to format it. I am downloading and installing to a USB drive to find out. Will take about 30 minutes for the download if it goes well.

What version of windows is running on the computer you have been using to post?

 

I post from my work computer. It runs vista.

 

This should work from Vista:

Follow the directions on this site to make a USB boot drive for Lucid Puppy.

Now, get your laptop to boot to the USB and just follow the onscreen directions until you are in Lucid Puppy. In the lower left corner of the screen you should have some drive icons. SDA1 will probably be your hard drive. Your USB drive is likely to be SDB1. Click on the drive icons to mount the drives and then you can drag and drop your pics over.

When you have everything off that drive that you want to save, from the Menu, select System, then select GParted Partition Manager. From within that program you should be able to remove the Windows Partition off of the drive.

I don't want to wipe my hard drive so I didn't check any further. However, there is probably an option to then create a new partition and format.

 

Mike, if you get to a point that you can't get the laptop booted up from a flash drive, here's an option: I have a cable here at work that I can hook up several different computer drives, including 2.5" laptop hard drives, to a USB on my computer. You can take that hard drive out and mail it to me and I can try to recover your data for you.
If it weren't the school's cable, I'd send it to you to use.

It's kinda a last ditch option, but it's on the table if need be.

 

that's very cool of you, Jim. It's going to be a few days before I take a crack at booting with linux. If that doesn't work I'll PM you.

 

any time is fine. If it comes to that, I'll try to recover everything I can and burn it on a DVD or something, format the drive, and send it all back to you.
Hopefully it won't come to that, since there's no telling what kind of shock the drive might get in transit, but I'll certainly do what I can

 

Good show Jim!