NC-10 Out of the box set up

Greetings to all the Sammy users!

I started out with an Acer Aspire One with the 3 cell battery. I appreciated the weight reduction and was thrilled with the concept. However, I found my self wishing the screen and keyboard were a bit larger and was totally disenchanted with the 2 1/2 hour battery. Thus I was led to the NC-10.

I am very excited......mine arrives in two days (BLUE) from Buy.Com

I am an experienced user but am unfamiliar with the "set up" process to which I read folks discussing, in particular "setting up the partition" for windows. I understand that is what Acer did and the partition was hidden and so do most computer makers these days. However, I have never set one up from scratch on a new computer.

Could somebody out there set up a "New -Fresh out of the Box - ? User's Installation Guide" for the NC-10. I think the partition is really important and I suspect others are feeling somewhat insecure about this process.

Also, when I had the Acer Aspire One, I did a wireless network with my big (HEAVY) laptop and installed MS Office and a few other programs using the cd/dvd on the mother laptop. If I should have a major meltdown and need to reinstall windows, will the wireless work such that I can do that again even though windows or? may not be working? In other words, is it Win XP that is required for the wireless to work?

My thanks to all. This forum has been invaluable for me to understand some of the issues. I am trying to hold off getting a new (HEAVY) laptop until MS reveals much more about Win7 (and hopefully replaces VISTA

Any "OUT OF THE BOX" tips are more than welcomed.

Thanks in advance of help,
Redfish

 

Some tips for the touchpad here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=325579&highlight=touchpad

Another tip is to switch on ClearType:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx

 

Hi.

Here is an unboxing.

http://forum.pocketables.net/showthread.php?t=1325

Regards

John.

 

The first thing that comes up is the Samsung Recovery Manager. The HDD is split into two partitions and you have the option to change the split.

I went for a smaller C: and bigger D: since the contents of C: will get replaced if you use the recovery.

The initial recovery image goes into the hidden partition at the start of the HDD. Subsequent recovery images go into a Recovery folder on D:.

See the attached photos.

John

 

John,

That is exactly some of the information that I was seeking. Do they give you a recommendation as to the size of the partitions or was that the allotment that I see on your screen shots? Determining the size of the partitions is a puzzlement to me.

 

That's pretty much up to you. I have C drive set to the least possible - 25GB and the rest for D where I store my music, games (whatever can be played..), pictures, etc. I swapped XP out for Vista so had to find all the drivers (a pain but all done now) and relevant utilities (Display Manager the only Sammy app I have; all keys and function keys work). For the original out of the box, everything past the partition is pretty well set up though you will see a mess of shortcuts on the desktop.

 

I recall the default was to equally split between C and D. I reduced C to what should be plenty for Windows + programs. In fact only 10GB of C is getting used at the moment, so lowteckh's suggestion of 25GB is better.

Something you should also do is to move the default My Documents folder to D:. This is very easy: Open Explorer, right click on My Documents then select properties. Then change the location to D:\My Documents.

John

 

^ Is what I did with the Vista start menu shortcuts - pictures, music.

 

This information is absolutely appreciated. I was thinking that you didn't need much more than 30GB for your "Restore" partition but never having set something like this up......I was feeling a bit insecure about the math. If my memory serves ---- I thing the hidden restore partition on the ACER ONE was 16 GB.

I noticed from the photos of the"unboxing" that this computer comes with all the original "Install/Backup" software. That was important to me as I believe every computer should come with this standard. Of course, nobody does this much anymore.....that is how CC and BB jack up the price making people think that they have to pay for that service.

Years ago, I bought a bunch of PCMCIA external CD ROMs for a group of teachers that had laptops with no cd. I am wondering if in the future somebody will come out with cheap usb CD/DVD read only for people to have as a back up source to install programs on netbooks. Seems like it could be done for $25.

Again......I thank you all. This is a great forum.

 

See this thread about cheap USB CD drives.

My NC10 came with one CD and One DVD, so make sure you get something that can read DVDs. If you don't have access to a burner then get a drive with burning capability. Otherwise, you can move files using a flash drive. You could also copy software discs onto a flash drive but then they may not autorun and you have to manually figure out what file to run.

John

 

I don't know about $25, but I did score the Samsung SE-S084B external DVD drive for $50 at MicroCenter on Black Fridayk, and you can regularly find it available online or on ebay for a little bit more than that.

It's a no frills 8x DVD reader/writer and requires 2 USB ports (but no external power). There are other drives out there that offer lightscribe (Samsung T084) or may be reliably powered through 1 USB port (the LS burner), but they cost a little bit more.

 

This was posted mnay pages ago, but

Back at NewEgg with free shipping for $51.99 - are those who purchased this for use with NC10 happy with it - plays movies well? How much does it eat power when on battery only?

Search for Item#:N82E16827151178 since I'm too unworthy to post links yet

Steven

 

I've tried the NC10 playing a DVD copied to the HDD (backup using DVD Shrink) and the power consumption at half brightness was about 10.8W (so potentially almost 5 hours - the 100 minutes took the power down to 68%). The visual quality was very acceptable. an optical drive running off one USB port could add up to 2.5W but overall power consumption will depend on the player software. Some versions use spare RAM to cache the DVD, so they only read the disc for about 1 minute in 10.

John

 

I can test this as I have the Samsung drive. I would be using MPC as the player.

 

Thanks for the advice. :smile:

I'm just setting up my white NC10 (got sick of the fingerprints), and I want to make the most of tweaks during the initial setting-up process which I didn't do with my black one.

I like the white one a lot more and I wish I had chosen it first time round, especially when I previously owned a pearl white EeePC 900.