Top 5 Essential Netbook Accessories

Now that I have a new netbook I decided to post a list of must have accessories to go with it. These are the small but essential items you need to go with your new netbook purchase.

1. Pouch/ Sleeve

This is a thin and lightweight sleeve which is essential for when you want to just chuck your netbook in a rucksack and go. It will protect it from knocks and bumps. They come in a range of colours so you can match your outfit or netbook. The pictured sleeve is manufactured by Belkin. It is made of tough neoprene

which should be able to withstand wear and tear.

2. External Hard Drive

As most netbooks come with very small built in hard drives you will most likely need an external one to supplement your storage needs. They range in capacity from around 80Gb to 500Gb. The best option is a slim portable one however you can get larger external drives up to 1Tb of storage. The pictured model is an iomega model.

3. Wireless Mouse

As I found out with my netbook purchase, alot of smaller laptops have sub-par trackpads. This

means the best option is to purchase a mouse. To reduce cable clutter around your laptop I suggest getting a wireless mouse. There are two main types of wireless mouse; bluetooth and ones with a seperate usb adapter. I would reccomend a blutooth one

such as the pictured logitech one as it saves using a USB port.

4. USB Thumb Drive

As well as an external hard drive you will probably need a small, portable means of storage for transferring documents between computers and backing up files temporarily. This is where a USB thumb drive comes in handy. You can simple plug it in save a document then pop it in a port on another computer and copy across for nearly instantaneous transfers. You can also use it to store small "portable apps" which can then be used on any computer you are using.

5. External Optical Drive

While netbooks do not have an internal optical drive in oder to keep their size and weight down, sometimes you will need to use an optical drive to watch a film, save data or copy music or even install an operating system. This means you will inevitably need an external optical drive. Now you can get a very thin lightweight drive powered from one USB port which is perfect for your little netbook.

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My Dell Mini 10v

Recently as a small gift to myself I purchased a new computer. I already had a desktop that is fine for almost everything I need, however wanted a small cheap laptop for taking to the coffee shop to update my blog and check emails. I scouted various websites and I just happened to be looking at the Dell page and noticed they had a special offer on their "netbooks".

I looked at the various options and decided to go for the cheaper option the Dell Mini 10v. The "v" here denotes value. I chose the lowest specification as I was planning on using it solely for light use. After two weeks a nice little package arrived on my doorstep. At first I wasn't sure what it was, however upon opening it I realised it was my new laptop. When I unboxed it the first thing that struck me was the size of the computer. The footprint of it is barely bigger than a DVD case. When I booted it up the next thing that struck me was the noise, or more accurately the lack of it. Due to the Solid State Drive (SSD) and the lack of fans this tiny laptop was totally silent. The second thing that struck me was the speed with which it booted. It took barely 30 seconds to boot up. This is due to it booting a slightly optimsed version of Ubnuntu 9.04 and having a SSD, having 1GB of ram doesn't hurt though.

Overall my experiences so far have been extremely positive. Writing this post on the keyboard has been very comfortable and my words per minute are hardly decreased from a full sized keyboard. My main concern is the trackpad. It is very twitchy and is really small.

Positives

* Size and weight: about a kilogram, fits in the front pocket of my rucksack.
* Excellent keyboard
* Good looks
* Extremely quick boot time
* Decent speed for everyday tasks

Negative

* Glossy lid attracts fingerprints
* Slightly cheap built quality
* Terrible trackpad; very twitchy
* Screen resolution fairly low (1024 x 600)

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My "new" MP3 player.

For a while now I have had a Sansa e280 Mp3 player. It has served me well and I really like the ability to upgrade it with Micro SD memory cards, however I was getting tired of the music on there. When I went out and brought an 8GB Micro SD and tried it, it didn't work. I was confused so I did the usual thing when i'm confused; I googled it. It turns out that the first generation, of which mine was one, cannot use Micro SDHC cards, e.g. cards above 2gb. I found there is a solution however:


ROCKBOX

This is an amazing peice of software, availble for many models of Mp3 player, including the ubiquitous iPod. It is very easy to install and it not only solved my memory card woes, it did so much more. It is fully themable so I downloaded a windows vista style theme which was easier on the eyes than the default black and yellow theme. I also descovered that it comes with plentyfull games and apps. It even has a DOOM emulator for when you might want to get your game on, whilst riding the bus.

I am actually glad that my new memory card didn't work as installing Rockbox has given my old Mp3 a new lease of life. And I can now store 16gb of tunes for when i'm out and about. If you get a chance try this awsome software on your Mp3 player.

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