Well, my story may not be as creative, elaborate, or desperate as some of the other folks here, but I will share my story about my tired netbook that I still actually
using. In June of 2009, I made my first purchase on the Acer AOD250. It was bundled with Windows XP and 1GB of RAM. I saved up to purchase it using accumulated money from mowing lawns for neighbors, babysitting, and doing IT work at my father's company. It cost me $350 new. As a freshman in high school, it did everything I needed it to. I used a user license for Office 2007 on it from a family edition that we had purchased back in the day. Over time, I began to run into huge performance issues. The Intel Atom N270 processor it had hardly could run Flash videos without stuttering and often froze with basic tasks, such as in Word. Through Newegg, I was able to upgrade the RAM to 2GB, which made a minor, albeit very helpful improvement for overall stability. One night, when writing a 12 page essay, I got up off the couch I was sitting on, and after doing so, the netbook slid off the pillow I had it sitting on as weight shifted across the couch. As I turned around, I found the netbook on its' side with its' glossy 10.1" 1024 x 600. Picking it up, I found a large crack down the middle of the screen and the hinges on both sides had cracked and become loose. After doing research on how to disassemble the netbook and ordering the most affordable screen replacement I could find, I went about replacing the screen. The replacement screen is matte and not glossy like the original, which in a way makes it slightly better, but the ensuing issues I have dealt with over the past couple of years is best described in pictures:
Being an avid Microsoft fan, I have used every version of Windows 8 published, from Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, Release Preview, and of course now RTM. The most limiting factor being the aforementioned screen resolution of 1024x600. No 'Metro' applications have the capacity to launch as a result of the low resolution. The only way I can force them to launch is modify the registry, which has adverse effects on my aging AOD250. First, text on the screen becomes hardly legible (as the unit is forcing a resolution beyond the screen's capability) and everything is very laggy and hardly responsive. The unit heats up and makes another issue glitch up more often:
Although I have done nearly everything in my power to try to resolve this, I believe the ultimate cause of this is a matter of either a very poor connection as a result of the damaged hinges pinching the display wires, a damaged connection to the panel itself, or an issue with the graphics processing. Either way, the only way to fix this when it occurs is either disassemble the panel and try to tweak the monitor connection, which only helps as a short term fix or simply tap around the hinges or back of the screen. Why do I need a new Surface? First of all, the built in Office 2013 suite would allow me to take notes with a capacitive pen in my college classes, keep all of my documents off of a local, unreliable 160GB 5400RPM HDD and them synched to the cloud, and not to mention the battery life. Of course, over time my netbook's battery life has dropped from a very respectable four hours of battery life (a selling point for me at the time) to a measly 30 minutes, if I'm lucky. That's no exaggeration. The battery depletes so quickly, the aging netbook reports approximately 55% remaining battery life before completely shutting down, which is anywhere from 25 to 35 minutes of use. That means whenever I go to class or a lab, I have to be near a power source in order to not lose data and where I am on the device. Those are just a couple of niceties that would come about from a device upgrade. That's not to mention the frustrations of constantly fiddling with my screen just to make it work and the fact that I cannot run any Metro apps! Anyways, I know I might not have a chance in winning this but I thought I would share an interesting story from a poor college student with his netbook. If anything else, I have managed to run Windows 8 on a first generation atom processor and still am able to use it (caveats aside) nearly every day! Thanks WPCentral, Nvidia, and Microsoft for hooking people up with great news, technology, and know how, respectively (the contest too)!:wink:
), it?s an amazing smartphone and really has been a huge help for me but it?s impossible to fulfill all the computing needs with a smartphone, even of an average user.
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