Can't get this Netbook into Tortuga by me onesie, savvy?

Poststructural Pub
1

This is Chapter 2 of the adventure referenced in the Hackintoshing thread.

While I am still intrigued by the piratical and generally cool nature of hacking a netbook to run Mac OS, I made the practical decision to acquire a regular netbook running Windows 7. (I guess it’s Windows 7 Starter…whatever 'dis means…)

This is to be an auxiliary machine. I recognize that these small things have significant processing limitations. A MacBook Pro is my main, and the function of the netbook (a Toshiba 305 series) will be to provide a more portable writing device. It is aggravating when a poof of inspiration blows through and must be captured on an iPhone keyboard. Great for texting. Not great for paragraphs. Also, I won’t be as freaked by the idea of a little, relatively cheap, computer (which does not contain all my vital files) getting damaged or stolen.

As such, (and as Bill Chin pointed out in the hackintosh thread,) the basic word processing should be satisfactory on a PC even though I favor Macs. Ok, I’m a Mac-elitist. I admit it. I don’t know whether I’ll like typing on an iPad yet, and even if I do, I don’t want one until they’ve been road-tested for longer and a subsequent generation is released. So, the netbook is a known commodity. And 3G necessities can be handled via iPhone.

I am not completely unfamiliar with PCs, as I do have to fool with the Gateway desktop which is the primary domain of the kid. (who will be 18 next month…can you believe it?) In fact, I’ve reinstalled that system at least a couple times when Evilware, acquired from the various fanfic and/or anime sites he frequents, turned its brain into schlopp. Now it runs Kaspersky AV, and has been clean for over a year.

So I am interested in the following type of advice: Recommendations for setting up the netbook to minimize crapware and headaches, and also for basic security. Because it is likely that on a short 2-3 day trip I would bring the netbook rather than the MacBook, and might possibly have cause to do something sensitive on it such as log in to my bank.

Suggestions I’ve found online include using Opera or Chrome instead of Firefox (which is fine for Macs, but problematic on PCs?), uninstalling superfluous programs right off the bat, and using an AV program that is better for netbook brains than space-eaters like Norton and such.
(this might be free programs such as AVG, or MS Security Essentials, or Avast.)
I have also encountered a suggestion to use Open Office rather than MS Office.

I welcome advice and suggestions!

2

I’ve never used anything else but Firefox on PCs.
Not sure what folks meant by “problematic”. You can
also run Safari on Windows (I assume it works on Win7,
but I’ve never tried that OS).

I like Open Office. It can save in several formats without
the extra goofy markup that MS Word can put in, which
might be good for xferring back to Mac. What do you
use on the Mac for word processing?

I have found MS Security Essentials to be pretty good.
It’s caught a few things on the way in. You have to
make sure to run a scan once in a while, since the
machine is not necessarily going to be turned on when
a scan is scheduled.

Be careful of a new Malware class: the fake AV
software. I’ve gotten this twice somehow, probably
via Trojans. I think it was running ahead of the AV
updates (MS Security Essentials has since caught
it during scans). It is software that looks very much
like a professional AV package. When I got it, the
program called itself “AV Live” or “AV Soft”. Seriously,
it brings up a screen that actually looks like a real
AV program is running a scan. Then it says it found
viruses and you have to buy their software to get rid
of them (of course, if you give them your credit card
number they go on a spending spree). It is very clever;
anyone not paying enough attention might just think
they need to renew the AV software they already have
and don’t realize it’s a fake. It keeps you from shutting
it down, too: every time you try to bring up the Task
Manager to kill its process, it blocks the Task Manager
and says that program is infected. Insidious.
http://deletemalware.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-remove-antivirus-soft-fake.html

3

I’m not sure either. Something to do with excessive taskbars and built in spyware or something.

What do you use on the Mac for word processing?

Usually Pages, which can open most Word docs. But I also have Office Mac, because the Mac-specific spreadsheet–Numbers–does not always talk to programs that want something to be up or downloaded in spreadsheet form. Excel is often required. For example, if I want to export records from Filemaker.

Be careful of a new Malware class: the fake AV
software…It keeps you from shutting
it down, too: every time you try to bring up the Task
Manager to kill its process, it blocks the Task Manager
and says that program is infected. Insidious.

That’s exactly what we had on the Gateway PC that finally moved me to install Kaspersky.

4

Opera isn’t a perfect solution. MS deliberatrely broke java and then made sure Firefox alone had what it needed to handle MS Direct X seamlessly. This was enough to prevent IE from being a monopoly, but it has had - by design - the effect of preventing Opera and other browsers from working perfectly on many script-heavy sites that are optimized for IE.

5

Do you have any sources for that? I’m not doubting
you, I’d really like to know if there are things I don’t
know about my Firefox.

Did you mean javascript?
I did not know MS had any say in Java standard…

6

I can’t find the reference to Firefox that I’m thinking of, and very well may be mis-remembering what it said. Another site, though, makes a recommendation for Chrome that is specific to Netbooks (as opposed to other PC machines,) because it is simpler, and the goal is to minimize pixel munching, and the tab feature in Firefox requires more than Netbooks can comfortably afford.

7

I use the free version of AVG on my netbook and I’m in and out of the country on a regular basis, using internet access whenever possible. No problems so far.
I use both IE and Chrome (not thrilled about either but they’re adequate).

My netbook also handles the 2007 version of Office Home and Student without any problems though my OS is XP. Windows 7 would probably be better. But I’m not going to fork over the money to upgrade.

8

Emmline - I’ve used nothing but a netbook for all my home computing needs for a year and a half now. It’s an 8.9" screen, 10" keyboard ASUS 904.

I’ve also been a firefox user for…um…since it came into existence? It does not have any security problem that I’m aware of, and you can use add-ons that give you much more screen real estate than you get with Chrome or Opera. The only downside to firefox is about a 10 second start up when you open the browser. After it’s up, it loads pages (for me at least) as fast as Chrome. For a netbook I suggest the following add-ons:

Ad block plus, Hide Chrome, Tiny Menu, and the Theme Stratini. Using those, you get about 1/4" more screen space up top than those huge tabs on chrome. Plus, you also get a true ad blocker with Firefox…chrome’s ad blockers really stink.

As for antivirus, Avira consistently has the highest rating of the free avs (better than the vast majority of paid) and has a very small system footprint which is ideal for a netbook: www.free-av.com . If you use avira, it has an annoying daily pop-up ad for their paid version, but you can disable it using the vista instructions found here: http://tipsfor.us/2009/03/18/avira-antivir-updates-to-version-9-make-it-more-usable/

We use avira on my netbook, my wife’s vista laptop, and my son’s windows 7 laptop, and we’ve never had a virus.

Open Office is fantastic…it can save in more formats than any other word processing or spreadsheet program that I know of…plus, it’s free. My wife writes, and loves it because it can handle all the different formats publishers seem to want.

OK, I can’t think of any other netbook tips…although I would like to say there are very few things a netbook can’t do that a full laptop can for most users (except maybe gamers).

Eric

9

Firefox? Some civilians can’t get their head around the fact that Firefox won’t automatically load what it thinks you might need, as some other browsers do. It’s a security feature. Damn right, it should ask. Simple example, look on Facebook through Firefox, and you’ll find that the games don’t show up. And many of the advertisements won’t show up! Hurrah! Result! That’s because Firefox wants you to tell it that it is OKAY to download an application to run these yokes - whether it is Java, Quicktime or whatever. Once you’ve downloaded these, it looks just as you would expect on IE7.
Some games - Fellowship, for example - haven’t quite got to grips with the different browsers, and the “result of battle” page on Fellowship is a real mess in Firefox.

I have friends who have nervously installed Firefox, and complain that half the Internet Pages they look at don’t do anything. It’s because they are too nervous to download Quicktime and Activex. Once they are persuaded to do this, they are much happier. It might have been me who gave you the willies on Firefox. I didn’t mean to. It’s perfectly fine, when used with an ounce of sense. Some of my friends don’t have this. Shut up. You don’t. Em does.

10

I’m doing this on my little netbook (Medion Akoya 1210) which I bought in Morrisons for £240 18 months ago. It has a 160GB hard drive, a 10" screen and full XP Home. It has the most-to-date wireless protocol and works brilliantly with my home hub all over my house and garden. I could edit photos on it but I’d rather use my bigger machine for that (and I only ever use Picasa for that). It has an SD card slot so it’s easy to load photos without messing around with camera cables and I can similarly load the recordings from my Zoom H4. I don’t like paying for antivirus (I never go on anything like a remotely dodgy website and I delete all unopened emails if I can’t tell who they’re from). I have AVG Free on this machine and Avast on my other and they’re both fine. I have Word 2003 on my big jobbie and I prefer the full-size keyboard for typing anything long and demanding, but this is fine for emails and the like. It’s handy to have Open Office on this one though I haven’t really used it much. Of course, there’s no disk drive on this one and, useless eejit that I am, I haven’t a clue how to put programs that I have on installation discs on to this machine. Advice would be welcomed! The on-board sound quality is rubbish but it’s great if I connect my Creative travel speakers to it, or earphones, when I’m out and about. The only gripe is the battery life. I’m lucky if I can get as much as 90 minutes out of it, and the mains adaptor weighs as much as the netbook! It’s worth checking before buying that you’re getting a full operating system and not a stripped-down version, and read the reviews to check battery life. I think Samsung do a good one for not silly money. I don’t know whether they’re all wireless-enabled these days. That, and the SD slot if you need it, are also worth checking for.

11

The trick here these days is to package them with Windows 7 Starter. The blurb is that it’s “optimized for netbooks,” but I’m sure that really it’s just a way to frustrate you into shelling out for the full upgrade later. There’s always going to be a headache or two included with your software.

12

That’s why they’re still selling 'em here occasionally with XP Home. It’s out of date, so presumably cheap, but it’s a full version and it’s hunkydory for a little machine like this. The British public has an aversion to forking out dosh for something that immediately needs even more dosh spending on it!

13

Hi emmline

Windows 7 starter edition exists to let you run Windows 7 on a netbook, rather than XP or Linux. A full installation of Windows 7 would likely need a netbook with 2 gig of ram and a dual core atom processor. With the price that would cost, you would be better buying a proper laptop, and get more for your money.

David

14

I think the recommendation for Chrome instead of Firefox is partly due to processor speed. My netbook is a Dell Mini 9 with 1 gig RAM and 8 gig flash drive (and Ubuntu OS). Firefox is apparently a processor hog compared to Chrome, and many netbooks have the bare minimum in processor speed anyway.
I switched to Chrome a couple of months ago and did notice an increase in the speed of page loadings.

15

Firefox 3.5 or 3.6 addressed the memory leak - or at least it appears to have done so. I ran both Chrome and Firefox last month to see if Chrome had reached a point it could do all Firefox could (it’s really close and a nice browser overall, still uses more screen though and the ad block really isn’t there yet…I haven’t seen an ad using firefox in years, and I like that). Memory usage was lower on my XP netbook with the current version of firefox, but it was close.

Now, for those running off SSDs of 8 gigs…I do think the program for firefox is larger overall, so Chrome has the edge there.

I also don’t like that you can’t customize chrome nearly as much as you can firefox. I like to tinker, and Chrome is designed to be simple…which can be a good thing but is limiting.

Eric

16

Any idea what’s crippled or removed in the
starter edition to lower the footprint?

17

I’m on an ASUS message board, too, and starter 7 supposedly really isn’t that crippled. You loose a lot of customization. For example, you can’t change a background, and some of the cool effects are gone because there is no Aero, it’s 32 bit only, and you can’t watch a DVD without adding additional programs/codecs. Originally, starter was limited to 3 apps running at the same time (although things live AVs and other essential background programs didn’t count in this tally), but Microsoft dropped this limitation.

For most netbooks, that’ll work. Not sure what happens if you have a DVD usb drive attached…will the DVD work?

Eric

18

Not sure just what Windows 7 starter edition has, but when I bought my netbook; an ASUS eeepc, it didn’t come with software to play a DVD because it doesn’t have an optical drive.

That’s easily remedied if a person wants to watch movies or add software. Just download one of the many versions (Sonic, Roxio, Nero; whatever) from the net. Then get a small portable DVD player with a USB plug. My netbook runs the software and powers the player without any problems.

19

Got one of those. The reason for the netbook, in my case, is strictly easy portability.

20

Me too. Plus I can leave the biggie for the missus to use when I go and visit my mum in Manchester. I have a mobile broadband dongle that I got for ten quid for 18 months’ unlimited broadband when I bought my BT wireless hub. :smiley: