It has been about two weeks since my netbook arrived. I have been using this daily, in fact, it goes everywhere I do. This is the luxury of having a small unit that packs a lot of punch. I have learned, and done, a lot to this unit in the short time that I have had it. Here are my thoughts thus far.

Out of the box

My unit is the Averatec 1000 which retails for $429.00 at Circuit City. The unit I received is black with a 3 cell battery and measures 10.5 inches wide, 7.1 inches deep, and 1.3 inches thick and weighs in at 2.6 pounds. It has the Intel Atom N270 / 1.6 GHz processor, 160 GB SATA hard drive running Windows XP home, and comes with 1024 MB  DDR II SDRAM and can be upgraded to  2 GB. Like most netbooks it does not come with an optical drive.

The box contained the netbook, power cord and adapter, and an information sheet. There are no software CD’s or user manual. These are on the unit in the form of a recovery partition for the software and PDF file containing the user manual.

Out of the box this unit runs very well. I loaded office 2007, Skype, google Chrome, AVG antivirus, Windows Live Writer, Sling Player, EvDO software, and iTunes. The N270 processor did not have a hard time handling this load.

More Power!

Since my knowledge was very limited with regards to the netbook I hit the Internet to see what I could find out about these little wonders especially the unit that I had. Much to my surprise I found out that my unit was a re-branded MSI Wind. This was great news due to the fact that some of the members of Mobility Today have the Wind and found it to be a great unit that can be customized. That is all I needed to hear and I was off to the races looking for was to give my unit more power.

My first upgrade was memory. I purchased an additional 1GB of RAM to max the unit out at 2GB. Next mod was to over clock the processor. A few of my Twitter friends clued me on this and I upgraded the Bios to MSI version 1.09 which enabled me to over clock the processor a maximum of 24% higher. The unit was running great.

With more power I felt I needed more storage. I purchased a 250Gb SATA drive for the unit and loaded it with Windows Vista. I figured with all this power lets load the most bloated OS in the history of computing and see what happens. I was happy to see that Vista actually ran pretty well. I was able to run glass without any issues. However I had to back down the processor to 15% over clocked to have the unit remain stable. I added all of the applications listed above and put the unit to the test.

How did Vista perform?

I found that over the course of a few days the unit seemed a little sluggish. Don’t get me wrong it still ran well but not as well as if it were XP. My biggest issue was web browsing. With multiple tabs set to open in Chrome the unit struggled to load and took a few minutes to render all of the pages. I also noticed that it took longer to connect to wireless networks. I do know that there is Dell wireless card that is reported to work well with this unit and might address these issues. I disabled some services that I was not using and this helped the performance. After running Vista for a week I made the decision to go back to XP. My decision was not based on the performance of Vista. This unit will run Vista without a problem. I decided to change because I liked the way XP ran on the unit. In my opinion it was faster both in performance and boot time.

XP or Bust!

I out the original 160GB drive back in the unit and formatted the 250Gb drive. I wanted to use this drive in the netbook but I did not have a restore CD. Fortunately Acronis has some great products that will allow you to clone your drive. The bonus is that you don’t even have to buy them. They let you try them for 15 days. Consequently this was 14 days and 23 hours more than I needed. I downloaded Acronis True Image Echo Workstation cloned the drive and was back up an running in less then an hour.

The main reason I wanted to do this was since I don’t have a restore CD I wanted to preserve the original drive. My other reason was I wanted the extra space. The more space the better.

Conclusion

I think that 2009 will be the year of the netbook. Having a unit this inexpensive is really going to appeal to the masses. My only disappointment with the unit I received  is the battery life. Granted my unit came with a 3 cell battery so I knew I was not going to get much out of it. However there are larger batteries available and I have ordered a 9 cell battery that will give me more than enough power. I have also purchased a car adapter so power should no longer be an issue. 

I plan on loading OS X on the unit and see how it performs as a Hackintosh. I will write about that process once I have completed it.

I am a big fan of the netbook. In all honesty before I got this unit I really did not know to much about them nor did I give them much thought. However the netbook is my new best friend. It is a small unit that is light, easy to carry, offers a lot of great features and if you pair one up with an EvDO card and you have a great mobile office.