I have been looking around for a new laptop to replace the one I bought five years ago. I wanted a 14″ or 15″ screen, over 4 GB of memory, Intel’s new Haswell processor, and a 6-cell battery, which combined with the efficient Haswell, should give me a lot of run time from the battery. I found a really nice HP for $399 (recently $349) at Best Buy that had 4 GB of memory, but could be upgraded to 8 GB, but the HP has a 17-inch screen and weighed over 6 lbs, making it bulky and pretty heavy.
Office Depot had a little netbook type of thing, called an Asus Transformer T100. While it runs Windows 8.1, it has only 2 GB of memory, internal storage of only 32 GB, and has an Intel Atom processor. It has a small 10-inch screen, no DVD drive, and weighs just over 2 pounds. It has a Micro SD slot (no room for a full-size SD card) and I thought I could double the storage by getting a 32 GB card at Fry’s for $18. It even comes with a basic version of Microsoft Office, all for $329. The “Transformer” part comes in because you can remove the keyboard and have a touchscreen tablet. All the keyboard does is give you a USB 3.0 port (plus keyboard and touchpad). So I was deciding whether to go with the big 17″ laptop, the tiny netbook, or wait for a 15″ laptop like I wanted. I decided on getting the netbook thing. I liked the idea of an iPad size Windows computer. Maybe eventually I will get a bigger laptop as a replacement for my desktop computer.
I’m typing on the Transformer right now. I will post a review after I play around with it for a few days.
I think this thing is just too small to use as a laptop, though it makes a great tablet. I’m also not crazy about Windows 8, but this is the first time I’ve tried to use it. The clicky on the track pad is quite loud, which I also don’t like. Probably better to try avoid using the clicky and tapping the touchpad or using the touch screen for things like scrolling.
I looked into returning the ASUS to Office Depot, but for computers they only do exchanges for defective products, not refunds. So maybe I’ll get used to it. I went ahead and got the 32 GB Micro SD card to double the storage, but the end of the card sticks out a little. You push the card in to release it and it seems like it would be pretty easy to knock that edge, pushing the card in and releasing it. There goes everything you’ve stored on that tiny, tiny card.
Though it wouldn’t be good for storing a photo, music, or video collection, there is still over 10 GB of space available on the computer after activating Office and installing Firefox and Chrome.