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Overall Rating

Terrible Mouse Buttons! Otherwise OK
I can’t believe that all the parts (screen, CPU, RAM, hard disk, keyboard, Windows license, etc), plus all the shipping (parts go to China and back, and then from Amazon to me) still only costs me $326. It’s a real bargain, AFAIAC.

I ordered another 1 GB SODIMM of RAM to upgrade, but realized that there’s only one slot on the inside, which already had 1 GB. You’ll have to buy a 2 GB stick and throw away the existing 1 GB stick to get to 2 GB.

The CPU is quite nice — it’s a dual-core, 1.66 GHz CPU. The graphics is GMA 950, although under-clocked to 133 MHz internal frequency. If you want to play games, you probably want to find a program called BK_GMAFIX and run that before you start the game — it will clock the graphics back up to 400 MHz! (Although this mainly affects texturing in 3D, so it won’t make things run 2x faster)

The battery is in the back, and the screen is farily heavy, so the entire thing is quite weighted towards the rear. This means that it will easily tip over when standing with the screen flipped up. On the other hand, if you carry it opened, with the Vee of the hinge in your hand, the weight is in your hand, not out towards the edges, meaning you’re less likely to drop it.

However, when it comes to ergonomics, there are two problems:

1) The Fn key (to get home/end etc) and the Ctrl key are swapped compared to most other keyboards. Fn is outer-left, and Ctrl is the second key. Anyone used to a standard keyboard and using key shortcuts will be driven crazy by this!

2) The mouse buttons are abysmal. They seem to require ten pounds of force to register — the mechanism literally feels and sounds like “crunch” (but I’ve looked — it’s designed that way). The mouse buttons have angled edges, so your thumb will quickly become quite sore. For regular left-clicks the touchpad can be tapped, which helps, but many kinds of click operations (right-click, longer click-and-drags, etc), you have no choice but to hurt your fingers. This is almost criminally bad!

Another caution: Most specifications online for the U123 say Bluetooth and b/g/n WiFi. This particular model does not have those features — it has b/g wireless only, and no Bluetooth. The lack of Bluetooth is a little annoying, given that you have to use an external mouse if you don’t want to lose your fingers.

All in all, this is a fine choice at the lower end of the netbook scale. And if you’re getting a netbook, it really doesn’t make sense to get a high-end book (like the Asus N10j, which has great specs — but costs twice what this one does!). If you want something better, you also want a bigger screen, so you should buy a real 13″ or 14″ laptop.