I remember a few years back, when the OLPC Initiative sparked off the netbook trend. This was before all computer manufacturers jumped in onto the idea with their own model. Netbooks had 7" screens, tiny SSDs and were meant to be low on power consumption, cheap and affordable. As soon as the 1st Asus EEE PC 701 with Linux was released I convinced my former manager that it would be a good idea to buy one as they were cheap and could probably be set up with Windows and Jaws for use with blind students.
Since then, I have set up quite a few netbooks with Jaws for students. Although, they all (mostly) have Atom processors and are almost identical, my success with optimizing them to run well has varied considerably between models and manufacturers.
Overall, I advise users to purchase the Asus EEE PCs as I've had the most success with them. This is providing they have at least 1gb of Ram (2 is much better) and a decent size SSD or HHD (20gb min). Weaker specs will work, but unless the user is technical, they will soon be needing support due to decreased performance due to the weak spec. Again...overall, I've had the least amount of success with Dell (Hell) netbooks. They had firmware and hardware issues, but I haven't got all day...
CONCLUSION: Asus EEE PCs, in my opinion, are the most stable netbooks for Jaws. I will soon be testing a few out with Thunder as well.
Please add any queries or additional info re: netbooks + screen readers here
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