I had some spare cash (well not spare, but you know what i mean) this month, and thought id get one of the gadgets id been lusting after for a few weeks.

My previous laptop (a HP Pavillion) has been getting a little ragged and has always been too heavy and to battery hungry to take out anywhere, but until recently a replacement has been pretty much out of my budget. Then I began to pay attention to the new wave of cheapo Eee clones, or netbooks as they seem to have been termed.

I pretty much ignored the first few to appear. While they were cute little machines the early Eee PCs with 2 and 4 GB solid state drives and in some cases celeron processors (I outright refuse to buy a celeron) just didnt have the specs to grab my attention. Of course once the Eee became a success the market quickly grew with a good sized handful of manufacturers jumping in to get their slice of the netbook pie.

Quite a few of these new machines were Celeron (or in a couple of cases Via) based, so just didnt have the performance of the purpose built atom. Many of the remaining brands had flimsy or awkward keyboards or bizzarely arranged touchpads (im sure id get used to it, but having the buttons on either side of the pad just put me off. And I didnt want to touch a machine with less than a Gig of RAM. I know these things arent designed for heavy memory hungry apps, but RAM is so cheap these days that I cant see much reason for fitting LESS than 1GB.

Then there was still the storage question. Im fully aware of the supposed benefits of the SSD format. While some say theyre better performing and more power efficient than a conventional Hard Drive the cost and storage space limitations just dont seem to balance it out for me (give it a couple of years for the technology to evolve, and for a 128GB or 256GB drive to become cost effective and maybe this will change). At present the only real benefit I see from the SSD is its resilience. A machine with an SSD will be far less vulnerable to light knocks than a traditional hard drive, due to its lack of moving parts.

And that left the choice of OS.

While I like linux the advantages of an XP system were too many to ignore for me. I know I can get my Windows apps and games running in linux and wine its just a little too much hassle for me on a day to day basis, plus on a dinky machine like this wine probably wouldnt be a great performer. Plus in my experience windows still has the edge on linux in terms of battery life and power management.

So that left me with a kind of spec wish list.

• Atom CPU
• 1Gb RAM or more
• Decent hard drive (preferably upgrade potential too)
• decent keyboard and trackpad
• XP

That left me with pretty much two options. The first was (i think anyways, there are so many damn versions that im not sure whats what…a valid criticism of the Eee range I think) the Eee 1000H. The second was the MSI Wind.

Both machines were pretty well balanced, with the exception of the Eee having a pretty major edge over the Wind in terms of battery life (although a 6 cell battery is available for the wind, with a 3rd party company apparently developing a 9 Cell, although I wonder how theyd FIT that into the diminutive Wind).

While I was leaning towards the MSI Wind for a few minor reasons both the Wind and the 1000H were a little out of my price range (Both were over the £300 mark). Then after a little more browsing I found the Advent 4211. The 4211 is identical to the MSI Wind, with the exception of the case logo, and it is in fact actually just a rebadged Wind (Advent is the PC world in house brand).

The bundle is a little different to the Wind (the Wind came with a bag and a 3 year warranty, while the Advent came with a…well it came with a receipt and thats about it.

However the £280 was in that netbook pricing sweet spot (less than £250 and youre looking at either a substandard machine or one limited in some way and over £300 and youre stepping on the toes of full size budget notebooks…and anything past £400 and youre beginning to get into traditional ultraportable territory) which is exactly the price I was after.

For some people the warranty difference (Wind: 3 Year, 4211: 1 year) would be a bit of a deal breaker by comparison, but I void the warranty on just about every machine I own (I plan to up the advent to 2Gb RAM and once ive got the capacity to take an image of the hard drive (I have no XP install disk, and I cant be bothered fiddling about with external hard drives) I may well be upgrading it to a 320GB drive for some media capacity) so thats not an issue for me.

Ive gotten it now (in fact im writing this on it) and Im thoroughly impressed with it. The screen is EXCELLENT, its very clear, has a good backlight and has a nice matte texture so im expecting outdoor visibility to be pretty good, although ive not been able to test this yet. And they keyboard is a real treat. It has no noticeable flex or give in it at all (most laptop keyboard ive used have felt noticeably flimsy and have bent noticeably under normal light typing pressure). Plus the full size enter key is a godsend.

While I cannot fault the QUALITY of the keyboard there are a couple of layout issues which, while I wouldnt go as far as to call a problem, are slight questionable. Noteably the FN key being on the bottom left and the CTRL key being to the right of that. Still im getting used to it, and it does make it easier to access Home and End (FN left and FN right). The , . and / keys are also slightly narrower than the other keys, but these are something more than liveable given the excellent standard of the keyboard.

Performance wise ive found the machine to boot quickly, and be more than acceptable in terms of operational nippiness (although ill be taking care to try and keep the machine from getting cluttered as I can see it having trouble under a huge weight of apps). Plus ive found it runs quietly and quite cool compared to a lot of other machines ive used.

As for other hardware features there are a few of note. There is a card reader, which is pretty much standard on this class of machine (essential given the lack of optical drive) and a 1.3MP Webcam. From the reviews ive read it seems ok, but I dont have the knowledge to say how good it is really, as ive never owned one before. Also there are the standard inputs and outputs (3 USB, 1 VGA, headphones and microphone jacks) plus a built in Mic.

Included software is pretty minimal (I consider this a good thing). I found only MS Works, The office 2007 compatability pack, basic driver software, cyberlink youcam and acrobat reader. Of course the first thing I did was ditch acrobat and Works, but ill cover recommended software for a machine of this type soon.

Ive also found some moderate success in getting games to run on here and ill post some tips on netbook gaming and choices of software for our dinky little toys soon.

Flower Close Up: Testing my cameras close focus during a bored lunch break

Woody Growth Stuff Close Up: Another bored lunch photo. Something on the side of a tree…

Sad Donkey: This guy and a couple of horses inhabit some empty land at the end of my road. Ive no idea who owns them, but theyre friendly enough if they think theres the prospect of you feeding them.

Ive read quite a few reviews of spore since its release, and there seems to be a common theme amongst them. The consensus appears to be that while its a good game, its both flawed and ultimately dissapointing. I’ll admit that a sizeable part of this is due to years of hype and PR building up the impression that this would be  some kind of quantum leap in gaming, putting a new level of control into peoples hands. Then on playing the final game a kind of angry dissapointment seemed to set in. Just take a look at the comments on a lot of reviews and youll see a lot of dissapointed god gamers…Well that and general disgust at the games DRM system. But thats a can of rage I dont wanna open tonight.

However I think theres a misconception of what the game is, at its heart. Ive seen complaints about the simplicity of the games 5 stages, the lack of in depth control over development and the lack of relation between the creatures appearance and capability.

But thats applying a rather conventional logic to what in some ways is a rather unconventional game. Im sure you have all heard “casual gaming” used as a catch all term for simplistic web based games and bejewelled-esque puzzlers. But to be accurate casual gaming is gaming without the attachment to games or the invesment of time some of us put in. Perhaps a more accurate term for this sort of game would be “pick up and play”, a category both bejewelled and spore fall into.

At spores heart its not a traditional game but a toybox, a container filled with fun things that you pick up, play with and then dump back in the box.

Take the creature creator (and the vehicle/building/ship creators etc) as an example. Anyone (well, within reason….the bottom 10% of callers to an IT Helpline may be excluded) can pick up the creature creator and have a few mintues of fun piecing together some sort of hideous bowlegged monstrosity (evidenced by its success as a standalone app). But if the depth and level of control many “hardcore gamers” wanted the CC would be a stat ridden monstrosity which would be out of reach to a lot of people who just want to make something that looks cool (or admittedly some kind of giant walking fertility idol) .

If you want the depth that each stage could have had then there are plenty of alternatives drowning in depth. You want a city management sim then get a simcity game, or one of the many alternatives. And the obvious parrallel for the space stage of course is Galactic Civilisations 2 (a cool space sim just SWIMMING in charts, graphs and numbers), but conversely these titles are well out of reach of the “pick up and play” gamer.

And like it or not this sort of thing is probably here to stay. The casual gamer is a relatively new market and potentially its a much larger potential for sales than the traditional game market (youngish, male, geeky etc…lets face it were only a smallish percentage of the earths population).

if you were to gather a handful of passers by in the street and plonk them in front of a PC I would bet that youd likely only find one or two people who could handle GalCiv2 or Sim City but barring one or two everyone could handle spore. And thats the key to it from a money perspective. Accessiblity is the word.

Designing your product to be attractive to the top 10% of advanced users excludes that remaining 90%. But if you build for the 90% then (if its sufficiently cool) it may still attract that 10%.

And whether we, the 10%, approve or not doesnt matter from a finance departments perspective. And these days with the exceptions of some of the more obscure companies out there the money people have ultimate control over just what gets done.

Still I dont really mind (although i daresay if I ever want to install on my laptops or reformat my pc I may change that view), I still like spore, I still think my Stugly are cool (and his ship pictured above, the Garadanth) and I just wish The sims 3 and Spore were to be cross compatible (come on, I want to start a house load of aliens on planet dissidia, with the occasional Grox invasion).

You may wonder why i’ve set this up when ive got my own forum. Well sometimes I feel the need to rant about things that arent related to my unpaid second job.

That and ive been meaning for 3 years to relate some of my better tales of Helpdesk Horror accumulated in my years in my current job (theres some real gems in there…all the better when you consider just who the users are).

And of course ive been belting out my opinions on movies and games via messenger for a long time. I may as well write my angry diatrabes and occasional fanboyistic speeches.

What the hell…you never know…someone might even be listening…