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Best OS For Netbooks and Underpowered Tablets?

Posted by Soulskill on from the vista-right? dept.

vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by managing to give me a better battery life. I've been happy using XP Tablet on this machine until recently, when I started thinking that by optimizing the OS for targeted use, I may be able to squeeze more out of the device. So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop? Usage is typically light — web surfing (with multimedia), email, word processing, spreadsheet and reading PDFs. Also, what OS would you recommend for a ultraportable tablet? Usage is similar to a netbook; there's a little more document editing going on, and good handwriting recognition and note-taking software would be great." Read on for further details about vigmeister's question. vigmeister continues, "I would like for the user experience to be snappy on a computer that is essentially running the equivalent of a 1.2 GHz PIII with 512mb RAM. The other objective for both of these is to maximize the battery life, as that is the major drawback of these ultraportables. A small memory footprint would work wonders, since the hard drives on these devices are typically slow and completely suck the joy out of using them when swap space is being used. Any tips? If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I know! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You're probably joking, but Windows Vista actually has the best tablet support of any operating system I use (XP/Vista/OS X/Ubuntu). I think handwriting recognition is one of the few things that Microsoft actually got right.

  2. 'story' tags by dnwq · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    You know, the stoptaggingeverythingstory and !story tags are getting more annoying than the story tags to begin with.

    Anyone else feel the same way?

    1. Re:'story' tags by rikkards · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      I think tags are annoying and wish there was a way to get rid of them. Especially since they are whatever you want to put in.

  3. emacs by jc42 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Huh? What?

    It isn't???

    --
    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.