Any experience with the "Starling NetBook"?

[Paul Rumelhart]

Bas Roufs wrote:
> Hello Paul and everybody else...
>
>   
>>>   "Starling NetBook"....due to arrive tomorrow.,....
>>>       
>
> Is it possible for you to share something of your first experience at
> this forum?
>
> Respectfully yours,
>
> Bas.
>
>   

Well, it arrived yesterday.  I haven't done much with it yet, but I'm 
pleased so far.  I let it charge while I went to work so I don't know 
how much charge the battery might have had when it arrived.  When I 
first turned it on, it ran through some booting tasks and then ran me 
through a setup wizard.  It asked me for my locale information, my 
timezone, my keyboard (I use dvorak, and there were two choices - dvorak 
and classic dvorak), and it had me make an account.  One nice thing is 
that it has a choice to either let it boot up as the user all the time, 
make you enter your password to login, or make you enter your password 
to login and decrypt your drive.  I didn't try the encryption option, 
though I'll probably play around with it sometime.  I thought that was a 
nice touch for a computer I plan to use sometimes at conferences for 
work.  If I were buying it specifically for work, I'd definitely have 
given the encryption a go.

The stripped down gnome interface is rather nice, so far.  I haven't 
done much with it yet but get it connected to my wireless network.  I 
have my router setup to use WPA2, which the netbook seemed to know 
about, but I couldn't get it to connect.  I changed to WPA on the 
router, and it connected fine.  That may have been an issue in my router 
setup, I don't know.  Firefox works great.  I haven't set up email yet. 

Other than that, I've just played a token game of same gnome and 
mahjong.  The touch pad takes a little getting used to, because the left 
and right buttons are on the side instead of the bottom, where I'm used 
to them.  The keyboard is a little smaller than a normal laptop 
keyboard, but I didn't have too much trouble adjusting to it.  The 
screen is nicely colorful.   The netbook itself is really light.  The 
battery allows it to stand up a bit off the table, which I like. 

The only other netbook I've used is one I gave to my sister.  It had the 
stripped down Windows 7 OS, and it severely limited you in 
configuration.  It was nice to see that ctrl-alt-F1 brought up a 
terminal like normal on this one. 

I haven't noticed any performance issues yet, I'll be interested to see 
what that atom processor can do.

Paul