GREAT NETBOOK

[Mary Jo Cochran]

Gateway LT4010 - Walmart online - $180.  Lightweight, has little camera thing, and a free scaled down version of Word,  We have been playing with it all day.  Keyboard is nice too.

[Quyen]

Thanks so much for sharing, Mary Jo. I just picked one up for a loaner. Netbooks are getting scarcer by the day and more expensive! Tried to get two, but it wouldn't let me! Lol.  First and only thing I've ever bought from Walmart. Ha!

[Alice Clark]

Thanks, Mary Jo ~ I'm giving it a try, too.  Needed one more loaner.  Quyen, I think you could go back on and order separately and it would let you get a second one.  I don't know why it wouldn't let you get two at once.

[Quyen]

I got it in the mail already. I'm going to try it out tomorrow. If all goes well, I'll come back for a second one.

[Kelli Combs (admin)]

I wish we had a Walmart around where I live.  I don't even think there is one in the area.  The land is too expensive here and I don't think there is one.  Maybe Menlo Park has a Walmart.

[Mary Jo Cochran]

Kelli.  Anything you buy on Walmart Online you can have delivered to your house.  It has a Skype app too.

[Quyen]

As with anything one buys online, it comes in the mail, so you could easily get one if you want, Kelli. I THINK there is a Walmart somewhere in the East Bay. Maybe Oakland(?). I remember going into one (don't remember exactly where it was) to buy beef jerky years ago on our snowboarding trip to Tahoe. I'd rather just buy it online and get it delivered. With tax and delivery, it was just barely over $200. Pretty awesome deal, I think. It's WAY too slow to surf the 'net, but as a loaner, it will be fine, I think. Menlo Park would freak the hell out if Walmart ever tried to open up a store there; it's not "classy" enough for them.

[Kelli Combs (admin)]

Oh, good point.  I already have four netbooks.  That's enough.  I rarely get asked to bring more than four.  Just in case one breaks down, though, it's nice to have someplace I can get a new one cheaply.

I use these netbooks all the time; at least two days a week and sometimes more.  They have paid for themselves a thousand times over.

[Quyen]

Yeah, they pay for themselves with just one job.  I love setting up our netbooks for them. It's nice to know that I could just turn them on, attach the USB receiver, and they just work. If, for whatever reason, they don't work, I'm totally comfortable troubleshooting them. I had a bit of trouble setting up this Gateway I just bought from Walmart the other day. Tried to call StenoCast. The voice-message system kept saying it was after-hours; it was not (9:00 a.m.)! Before I called them back again, I got it figured out.  :) That's what I didn't like about the LiveNote system and the "cable" years; it was just too complicated.

[Kelli Combs (admin)]

What I found complicated is trying to troubleshoot every attorneys' laptop when they came in the room.  They would show up five minutes before the depo is to start and they'd expect you to figure out right away why it was not working.  Most of the time the IT department would lock the computer so you couldn't load the driver for Stenocast dongles.

This way with the netbooks, they just work and no troubleshooting.  I love that.

[Quyen]

They also like (and request) that we bring an extra laptop so that they could still take notes/have their outline on their own laptop.

[Alice Clark]

I'm running Bridge on my loaners (including this one).  To keep it from continually asking for your log-in on Windows 7 computers, you open the start menu, search for UAC (which is that permission protocol), and move the indicator down to "never."  That way when you open Bridge for realtime you won't have to log in. This might apply to the CC program as well, but I'm not familiar with it enough to know.