Toshiba Mini NB305-N440BL 10.1-Inch Royal Blue Netbook (8 Hour Battery Life)
Best Prices on Toshiba Mini NB305-N440BL 10.1-Inch Royal Blue Netbook (8 Hour Battery Life):
$377.95
Reviews for Toshiba Mini NB305-N440BL 10.1-Inch Royal Blue Netbook (8 Hour Battery Life)
First netbook, first PC for a Mac guy, so take with a grain of salt
I've never really used a PC for more than a few minutes at a time at a friend's house. I've been a Mac guy since 1992 when I began college and first got into graphic design. I have always hated Windows and I have always thought non-Macs felt like cheap junk, the interface always seemed difficult and clunky whether it was Windows 95 or XP. I have only tested Vista and 7 in the stores until I finally bought the bullet and just decided to get this little netbook... because, let's face it, Apple dropped the ball with that iPad crap.
Well, I've only had this thing for 3 days and it didn't take long to get used to. Some helpful people online told me which freeware to get to remove the extraneous crap Best Buy had installed on the machine and apparently I'm good to go with a couple free Antivirus programs. I probably won't be downloading any .exe or .zip files from warez, porn or music stealing sites on this thing just because I wouldn't really want to risk it; I'll do that on my mac. Not that I do that sort of thing.
I'm not sure what this is really good for. I have a text editor now so I can do some HTML/CSS/PHP in a pinch, but I'm not sure I'll ever really need to. Believe it or not, I pretty much got it just to test websites on the fly with IE8... since I do web design for a living, it just becomes inconvenient to always rely on browsershots, when I can check back and forth with my little buddy and see what's fugged up in Intercrap Exploder. It works for that just fine. The portability is an added bonus! And the price is right!
For people who want to write their novel in Starbucks or people who waste money on this sort of crap purely to surf the net, this would be a great choice! I'll be taking this on long trips for instant access to Google maps if I need it. For others like me who are not iPhone/Blackberry crazy, this is also useful for that kind of thing.
Youtube, Facebook, and pretty much any website I've tried (including some rather large ones I designed myself) look excellent on this thing. Fit on the screen well and not so small that it's hard to read. This is a great little thing to watch videos on when you're stuck somewhere without a tv, too... unlike an iPhone, which is painfully small to watch anything on for more than 3 minutes.
Keyboard is quality. Not junky feeling like most other PCs I've touched. Compared to the Acer, Dell and HP netbooks I've played with in the store, this thing feels like a Rolls Royce or something. Nice, solid little machine.
On a broadband wifi, it's as fast as you could ever want or need.
Toshibas don't come with a lot of bloatware, either. I only had to delete the Best Buy marketplace software and Norton Utilities.
Great battery life, great monitor brightness, color and clarity, Windows 7 is awesome!
All in all, a great purchase. Very satisfied.
