Santa ( my wife) decided I needed a new laptop and so here I am typing away on my new HP Mini 5105 Netbook.

My experience with Netbooks so far…

I had bought myself an ASUS EEEPC 701SD from Ebay ( paid $200 AUD  for it) and it’s been a great little workhorse. It came installed with ASUS’s own flavour of Linux which was very useable as far as surfing, writing etc. All the normal stuff one does. The 701SD is a 7 inch screen, 8Gig of SD Ram for the Harddrive, 512MbRam and I added in a 4Gig SD Card into the slot to give it a little extra. It was never intended to be anything more than something I could take with me and write stuff when the mood took me.

I even got it a car charger so I could it’s battery topped up when I was “out”.

The plan was to upgrade it to Kubuntu 9.10, but I never got that far… The kids have sort of taken ownership of it these days…

The reason I bought it was I had seen my (now old ) boss using one, and I was very impressed with a few things about it.

1. It’s small
2. There are no mechanical parts to it ( ie the HD is all semiconductor) so it can take a bit or rough handling.
3. The Keyboard is very useable, unless you have massive fingers.Otherwise it’s very easy to type away on.
4. The screen is extremely readable. At only 7inches you would think you would need a magnifying glass to see anything, but the opposite is true. It’s not the size that matters it’s how you use it…..and it’s used in a way that you don’t think – gee that’s small!
5. Battery life with the standard battery is about 2 hours…from memory. I might be wrong there, but then mine had been used and batteries get a bit tired with a bit of use. Still it’s not bad. You can upgrade the battery and get something like – 7 hours. I’ve not bought one so I’m going off the quoted figures on that.

So the Netbook, over a full blown laptop, held it’s own in my book. It’s not a replacement for a Laptop. It’s never intended to be,but as a mobile device that gives you the ability to email, write wonderful blog posts etc, it does the job just fine.

The HP Mini 5101

My wife decided I needed a bigger one! A Netbook that is! And I’m thinking it was more because she got a good deal on it (Santa won’t spill on how much) . Plus I’m starting a new job in January on contract… So it was decided this was the way to go. I must say I was very surprised and shocked and flabbergasted  all at the same time as I unwrapped “the present”.

For one thing, I knew nothing about any HP Netbook. I’ve only been following the ASUS netbooks in regards to what they had and what was selling on EBay…Ebay is an interesting place to watch how much things sell for. I must say, some people pay near or over retail price on netbooks. They are certainly popular, even the old ones…

So when I opened the box and took out this small, slimline netbook I was amazed at how light it was. Then on opening the lid, I saw the Keyboard….. Ok, I was initially shocked by it! Why?  Well I’m used to a keyboard where the keys are snug to it’s friend. Like a normal keyboard… But the keyboard on the HP Mini 5101 has padddocks of room between each key. Plus the keys themselves are huge…

It’s a bit like, Ok we’ve got lots of room here guys, let’s shift all the keys about to make it fill up the room we have…At first I thought it was going to be really annoying… but I must admit, as a bit of a touch typist, it works.

For anyone a bit slow and unsure of what keys to hit..It does give them a very good chance to hit the right ones . So I’ve come to accept the “paddocks” of room between the keys.

Functions are the wrong way

One complaint about the Function Keys like the F1, F2 etc… For some silly reason HP decided to make the special functions the main keys . If you want to use the F1 keys etc you need to hit the fn key…In my opinion this is the wrong way around… I’m more likely to want to Hit the F5 key to update something than change the contrast…

So to use the F5 key I need to press the fn key then the F5 key to get it to work…If I don’t I’ll put the machine to sleep. That even makes it more stupid! Want to refresh a page, Whoops I’ve just put the thing to sleep. Not good!

I’m not yet sure if this can be “reversed” by some setting. If someone knows, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

EDIT: I have found in my investigations (to make it sound terribly formal ) you can change this behavior of the “Arse about” Function Keys in the bios. So I am going there now so I won’t be cursing this otherwise brilliant netbook for going “to sleep” instead.

The Screen.

This is a 10.1 inch LED screen, nice and big. The resolution is the HD option of 1366 x 768. Which makes the text small, but it’s very crisp and clear. So I can get a whole lot of stuff showing on the screen. I’m quite impressed. Initially it all seems like “ant writing” but you do get used to it. Even with my shocking eyesight.

Operating System

This unit comes with Windows XP.  Ok ,I’m not a big Windows fan but…

Now HP, in their wisdom, actually provide the OS and all support stuff on physical CD’s.  So in the case of  a catastrophe, you’ve still got what you paid for. The question is, these units have no CD drive so how would you get the stuff back on it? There are a few ways, but nothing terribly simple. The main thing is, you won’t have a trashed system with no way to recover it. Although I think there is a built in restore  system if things go “pear shaped!”.

Oh, one thing I didn’t mention yet. When you first start the netbook up , it asks you a few questions and installs the OS for you. In fact it couldn’t be any simpler and you are up and running in no time flat. Yes I was impatient and plugged in the battery and plugged in the charger and got  it up… Very well done HP.

Some Specifications.

• Screen, LED 1366 x 768.
• CPU is a 1.6GHz,  Intel Atom E280
• Ram : 1G
• HD : 160G, 7200rpm.

I’m going to have to come back to finish this as the Kids are pestering me to take them down the street to use their gift vouchers….Till then take care and happy netbooking.

Cheers

Tim

Yes, out of the box, it’s one of those fill in the blanks and we’ll show some Clickbank (using Clickbank AD Rotator**, Amazon, PayDotCom, Ebay, Resale Rights Products, and Adsense.

But it does have a bit more to it than other scripts of this kind. You can see that it is well thought out. There are enough instructions available as “you go” to lead you through all the steps required to set up a site.

The first time I did it – from scratch – I built a site in about 45 minutes – taking it slow and documenting it as I went.

I created an Open Office Writer File to capture the information as I went, so I know what’s there.

Something I noticed with a couple of sites I have.

The main reason I’ve even bothered to look at this, is to get some life out of my parked domains. I had used a similar kind of script on a couple of websites which had been showing some Adsense income. Not a lot, we are talking about less than $10 USD each. BUT they were getting traffic and appearing in Google. Search for “LivePlay” on Google and one of my sites shows up on the first page.

Now that site is using a “different” kind of monetized script.

But the main points were,

1. It’s being crawled by Google and appearing in searches
2. It’s getting Visits, although the Adsense conversion is very low.
3. It’s not gathering dust on a parking service getting minimal search traffic and paying a percentage of any revenue it generates.[That's one way parking services make their money].

ClickBank Ad Rotator** – a Product which led me to create a bit of website magic to cloak the links – http://www.cb-ad-rotator.com – It’s Free!

I’ll be using this for many of my “parked domains”.

So the plan is to use this new script and set it up on my remaining domains. So bye bye parked page service and hello to creating a bucket load of new websites accounts.

It’s really a simple process.

So he said….It’s something I do on a regular basis. But here’s what I do, to give you and idea.

I find a domain – one I already have – Umm yeah well, I have over 200 at the moment – Yes I hate selling them ( but that’s now a better option as I also bought the License where I can resell sites using this script).

So I find the domain in a niche – for example – I bought http://www.personalwatercraft.info and is been parked not doing much. This is the website that’s getting the treatment with this new script.

Back to the process.

Find the domain – change it’s DNS Settings to point to my hosting, upload the script, bring up the website in Firefox, Log into the Admin section, fill in the info and Bob’s your Aunty.

Ok it’s kind of fun the 1st time, but anymore than that is going to become a chore and I hate working too hard…So I’m looking at a solution to that problem – stay tuned!

It’s early days, but from what I’ve seen of “other” scripts, this one has a fair chance at helping get traffic and possibly increase the conversion rates. We’ll see. I can see it does need a few tweaks. Being a Professional Tweaker, I’ll probably loose a few hours tweaking to get the desired effect.

This won’t suit everyone.

Seriously, don’t get all excited when you see words like – “Builds your site for you…”

These kinds of scripts work very well with product type niches. You do need to do your homework.

For instance – with Personal Water Craft, you need to find keywords that get relevant results back from Amazon, Clickbank, Adsense, Ebay etc. You don’t need to use all of these “Vendor” services. You might just want to use Adsense…

It does have a built in article facility.

This was one of the things that made this script stand out. It allows you to make some serious changes.

For instance, from the admin section you can add articles, add blocks ( like new sections). You can modify existing ones. You can add in your own affiliate links for relevant programs. It’s like a mini Blog in a way.

Problems.

The fact that the majority of the websites content comes from – other sites – can cause the page to load slowly. The other point is that if the site is down or “undergoing maintenance”  it can cause issues. I’m guessing that some form of caching would be nice to have.. but that has it’s own set of problems… For the “stuff” that isn’t likely to change that often, there’s no need to run off and fetch it on every page refresh. Hmm more thinking time is needed on this.

But it’s not a major problem. I’m just a fussy bugga!

Resources:

Domain Registration : I primarily use Dynadot .You can drop a domain name within 7 days so if you Whoopsie. Plus after $500 USD in purchases the price plummets. AND the user interface is Simple and won’t leave you sitting there for hours PLUS it’s wont up sell you on anything that can be thought of.

In summary – its log in – search – buy – and you are DONE!

Web hosting: I use GVO. i can create a individual Cpanel accounts for each website I’m hosting plus I can tailor the packages to suit. This also allows me to sell a website – hand it over and keep hosting it as a reseller. Plus it’s got an affiliate program that pays you monthly and has a bunch of other “Marketing” tools…..

Which takes me back to the point of having bought the “Site Resellers License” for MPW. So I can setup and sell ready to go sites using the script. Anyone interested in Personal Water Craft?

I’ve just got to update my website manager for this new site so I can leap into my AWStats with a click of a button. Ahhh Nice!