A New Toy

For Valentines Day I bought my wife a Samsung N130 Netbook. I had the idea of getting her one of these way before Christmas, but at the time I already had something else for her so I figured Valentines Day was as good an excuse to get her one than any, plus its ages until her birthday.

Initially I was after the Samsung NC10 which is quite old but all reviews claim is still one of the best for the money. Unfortunately I missed the boat by about 4 days as every shop I went to said things like "oh if only you'd come in last week we had stock then" and "its just been phased out, sorry".

I did manage to find two in PC World locally but they were both display models. In good condition but when I asked how much they'd give me off the retail price for buying one they refused to offer any discount. I actually said to the guy "look I'm here now prepared to buy this. You aren't getting any more in and its a superseded model. Surely its in your interests to sell it?" Still he wouldn't budge, so I walked out disgusted.

Giving up on the NC10 I went for the N130 which is one of the newer models and on the face of it just as good. Most of the online stores had it for the same price so I randomly bought it from Amazon UK.

My wife was delighted with it - much to my relief - and has used it every day since. Mostly she will use it to watch BBC iPlayer, check Ben's school website and generally browse the Internet so its ideal for the job and she can sit in the comfort of her lounge chair while doing so.

Added bonuses to the ownership of one of these is that Ben can do his homework on it from the table rather than at my desk plus maybe Chris will be interested in it or one like it when he gets into University later in the year.

The only issue I had with it was getting the wifi to interface with my router. Fortunately a call to BT Broadband Services sorted this out, although it took about half an hour to remedy and involved the engineer taking over the Netbook remotely. If I'm honest it may have all stemmed from a wrong address I put in there initially but which took her a long time to discover.

Anyway I highly recommend this little Netbook for anyone who just wants to surf and watch video's. You may say "Its not exactly a token of love", however I would reply that it certainly is. Okay its not flowers or chocolates, but those things are fleeting. This has use and shows how much I care about her, which is a heart achingly huge amount that I could never express sufficiently.