New Netbook

There are some things that seem to be to good to be true and turn out to be just that and some that you hope aren't. My Bauer W107W net book from Argos clearance seems to be one of those things that looks shady enough to cause you more hassle than they are worth and yet you hope they aren't. Are you following me? so far so good.

DHL landed yesterday with a battered looking cardboard box and a netbook that smelled pretty badly of cigarette smoke, all the rubber feet missing and the tamperproof seals all broken. Needless to say I wasn't too hopeful, even it it was still £160. It started up nicely and loaded up windows XP well enough and installed Faros, Glen Delahoys Auto FTP. The main useful components to my beacon monitoring station.

I followed it up with IE8 and the logmein client and hey presto after a bit of time (no more than an hour) the replacement unit was installed and running nicely. As the sun seems to refuse to play ball there are no actual spot coming through at the moment apart from the odd one here and there. However, the software seems to be working, the IC703 is clicking through the bands and audio is coming through the system. Perhaps I'm being too negative and it'll not miss a beat but you can't help but think that for such a low price it's going to break down!

If you are interested the spec is:

Intel Mobile N270 Atom processor. 1.6GHz processor speed.1GB RAM.10.1in screen sizeResolution 1024 x 600 pixels.16:10 widescreen.160GB hard drive.Integrated graphics.Shared graphics memory.Media card reader - compatible with MS/SD/MMC. 3 x USB ports. 10/100Mbps Base-T Ethernet ports. 2 stereo speakers sound. 0.3Mp webcam.802.11 b/g wireless enabled. Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition operating system installed. 4 hours battery life.Size (H)3, (W)26, (D)18cm. Weight 1.2kg.