Netbooks and You

I've got a netbook, the Asus Aspire One to be exact. It's a handy little thing, much easier to haul around than my old gateway. It's been a lifesaver on long train rides, allowing me to watch movies and play games to my heart's content instead of staring whistfully out the window. Speaking of games, I keep hearing and seeing complaints about the Netbook's graphical prowess. This is true. The netbook platform is utterly useless for gaming - recent games, that is. I've found that anything from the 20th century works wonderfully on it, as do most games from 2001-2002. The beautiful thing is, this correlates perfectly with the Golden Age of PC Gaming. I also have the SSD version, which has its good and bad points. On the good side, it gets wonderful battery life and is lightning quick with everything except Firefox (rather ironically.) On the minus side, it's lacking in hard drive space and web browsers hiccup every time a new page is loaded. So my ability to load tons of games is rather limited. Instead, I'm keeping one or two games per genre at a time. So my little netbook now has on it:

• System Shock 2
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Heroes of Might and Magic
• Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm
• Grim Fandango
• Alpha Centauri
• Roller Coaster Tycoon II + expansions
• Fallout

If I get bored of any of these, I just swap them out. Say I want to rock some Black Mesa action - I just install Half Life. If I use more than 6 gigs for games, I just take off whatever game I'm not really playing. This doesn't include all the LucasArts adventure games and NES, SNES, and GBA roms that I have on my GP2X. But there's more to life than gaming, and the Netbook handles movies and music just fine. I find the keyboard pleasant to use, and I use a USB mouse instead of the touchpad. All in all, it's a fine little computer that complements a powerful desktop very well.