Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/01/09

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Subject: [Leica] Travel hard drive?
From: rclark01 at comcast.net (Robert Clark)
Date: Fri Jan 9 08:53:17 2009

I have an ASUS and for the past two years, it's worked like a tank. No
complaints at all. It has an internal 80GB drive and when coupled with my
250GB Toshiba EXT HD, it's the perfect combo.

Robert Clark
Lancaster, PA

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+rclark01=comcast.net@leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+rclark01=comcast.net@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of R.
Clayton McKee
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 11:49 AM
To: Leica Users Group
Subject: Re: [Leica] Travel hard drive?

Quoth the Tina Manley :

> At 12:42 PM 1/8/2009, you wrote:
> >I just ordered an Aspire One "netbook" from Amazon, which I'll be
> >coupling with various portable HD's and readers.
> 
> I would love to have one of these for travel.  My only concern is 
> that the reviews go from 5 star - everything is wonderful - to 1
> star - the thing died two weeks after I got it.  I would hate to be on a
> month long trip and have the netbook just die.  The reviews of the
> ASUS Eee PC 900HA are much better with no reports of failures.  It
> costs about the same, but I like the looks and features of the Acer
> Aspire better. :-(

I've been looking at the EEE for a while, but y'know I just couldn't 
get comfortable with the build quality of the thing.  It feels almost 
disposable to me, and the keyboard is actually smaller than the AA-
1... and below my threshold for comfortable typing.  The Aspire felt 
much better to me.  And the brother geek/guru/hacker type was very 
happy to show me his, so it's not a complete unknown.

I've seen a few reports of problems with dying acers, but they've 
seemed to be from the same people who complain that it'll only handle 
a gig and a half of RAM, it's a bitch to change the HD, it's too slow 
to run the latest 3D FPS games, etc. etc., so I have to figure that 
probably they're just running the things too hard for too long and 
burning them out.  I haven't seen any reports of failure from people 
who take the "don't stress the machine any more than you have to" 
attitude that I live by, and my experience has been that if the 
system doesn't die within the first week or so, it's probably sound.

I'm not planning on putting PS or any of the "heavy" imaging software 
on it.  The primary photo things will be the Adobe DNG converter, the 
camera drivers, XNview, and GIMPdoze, which won't be perfect but 
won't cost extra or strain the machine, and will get at least enough 
done that I can blog decent web images and archive DNG's until I get 
home.

Add in openoffice, firefox, TopoUSA, CoffeeCup, Filezilla, tweetdeck 
and pidgin, and a couple of the nice seagate 320 go drives, and I 
should have a pretty slick little grab-and-go package with decent 
battery life...

Anyway I'm sitting here waiting for the nice FedEx man to knock on my 
door, and hoping he does so before I have to go shoot a school 
science workshop.  If he does, I'll put it on to charge before I 
leave; if not, I'll pick it up at the FedEx depot this evening.  In 
any case I'll try to post a preliminary evaluation tomorrow sometime.



--


R. Clayton McKee                           http://www.rcmckee.com
Photojournalist                               rcmckee@rcmckee.com
P O Box 571900                           voice/fax   713/783-3502
Houston, TX 77257-1900                   cell phone #  on request


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Replies: Reply from leica at rcmckee.com (R. Clayton McKee) ([Leica] Travel hard drive?)
In reply to: Message from leica at rcmckee.com (R. Clayton McKee) ([Leica] Travel hard drive?)