Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Chet Wautlands]

Hey guys.

I have a 3 year old laptop. I'm pretty sure it's about to die on me as it keeps telling me that the video card "recovered" from a failure... the battery only last 1 hour (down from 4) and two days ago I got a blue screen of death. I didn't even know they still had the blue screen of death... so 90s... ha ha.

Anyway, I'm tight on cash and thinking about my options for the mean time. I need a computer, but I don't do very much other than listen to music, surf the net and occasionally watch movies. So, I was thinking I'd buy a netbook for now and then buy a much better laptop next summer when I have some cash to spare.

Does anyone have any experience with netbooks? Are they awful? Can I still watch movies on it? (obviously the screen will be small. I'm more concerned with performance)

I also do occasional video editing. Simple stuff with power director. Can a netbook handle this?

Any netbook recommendations in the Seoul area?

Basically, help me out with this whole netbook thing.

Thanks!

[eamo]

Better to just bite the bullet and get a decent laptop.......you'll only be spending about 300,000 more.

[Chet Wautlands]

[eamo]

Go to Danawa's laptop page.

http://www.danawa.com/product/list.html?defSite=NOTEBOOK&cate_c1=860&cate_c2=869&cate_c3=10585

Then slide the price range slider in the bottom of the blue box down to your upper price limit.

Then scroll down to see what's available in your price range.

[Chet Wautlands]

Thank you sir!

[Skippy]

Netbooks are cheap in the US. Here in Korea they are not so. Get a laptop if little money get a desktop.

Have you considered getting your old laptop fixed up a bit. Get it cleaned out of dust and junk. See if no thermal paste is needed between the CPU and hearsink/fan. Add some more RAM! Consider doing as clean install of the OS if possible even get new harddrive. As to batteries - I think there are some places that will fix up batteries too.

[Chet Wautlands]

[Skippy]

Actually my first piece of advice is consider wether your laptop can handle Win7. Honestly I think a laptop from three years ago would be pretty stressful, Would you consider going back down to something like XP or even a linux flavor.

As to a repair shop. Check around Yongsan in Seoul. As to laptop RAM that should be available at any good electronics section of a good sized city. Most laptop usually come with 2 slots for ram. Most are usually filled with one slot. Yours will probally be 1 GB. So if you can fill that extra slot with another 1 GB.

[Gaber]

blue screens and gpu crashes are most often a heat issue. Do you tend to use you machine on your bed or some other insulating surface? One of those fan arrangements that go under laptops could be a cheaper solution if you aren't looking for an upgrade.

[jhicks99]

I agree it may be a heat issue.
My laptop started to overheat last year after about 6 months in Seoul. There's a lot more dust in the air here and I suspect it plugged up my laptop pretty good. Simply blowing on the vent really hard solved my problem (and gave me a disgusting mouthful of dust that I'm sure was incredibly unhealthy lol). I'd suggest having it cleaned properly, should be a quick and easy job for any laptop repair centre. Do that first and see if performance increases.

Netbooks can be great companion computers for traveling, in bed, on the toilet etc but they don't make very good primary comptuers at all unless all you're doing is surfing the web. A 2 year old used laptop would blow one out of the water I would think.

[The Lemon]