The Kennel Kernel

Hello Campers. Here is a draft of my proposed ebay advert to jettison yet another redundant purchase the GF made simply because she liked the colour. Needless to say I paid for it..


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Header: Mint Samsung N150 netbook Flamingo Pink, UK, battery tested 7+ hours, genuine windows XP + FULL Office Professional. No modifications. i.e. I haven't fucked this one up by fiddling with it. That's because I can't stand the sight of the wee cuddly wuddly beary beary boo.

160GB HDD, 1GB DDR Ram, b/g/n wifi, card reader, 3 USB ports, ethernet slot, VGA out, mic, headphones.

This is a proper UK netbook, bought from XX, running legitimate & genuine Microsoft Windows XP & Office Professional 2003. Barely used so condition is excellent & the all important battery still has it’s maximum capacity of over 7 hours (we looked after that), which I doubt any of the other machines on here will. E.g the one in the acer I bought from ebay lasts for all of 30 minutes. Factory Standard, so no dodgy ebay upgrades, modifications or reinstalls etc. Also has some useful/essential software extras, 6GB of superb music & 3 good films inc the best Vampire one for years. Yes! Got 50 Shades into it. That’s got to be good for a tenner.

And it’s in Flamingo Pink! That’s the official samsung description by the way. Frankly sex aid pink would be more accurate unless you’ve seen a lot of flamingos impaled on dildos. This could account for their fondness of standing on one leg. Tell you what though-take this baby out in public as a bloke & you’ll be fighting men who prefer the company of their own gender off with a shitty stick.

Comes with power adaptor, any documentation, a protective slipcase & possibly a pink bag. Light, distinctive & stylish-it certainly gets second glances! That’s because it’s nearly an ultimate badge of metrosexuality. Or that you're on the game.


Official Model Number is NP-N150-KA03UK

We bought this when my job changed to a bit of travel. We chose it for much the same reasons as you will: it’s very light, compact, strong, you can do some work on it, it connects to everything & runs Industry standard software. We did consider an iPad but it’s really no good at all for work or stuffing in a suitcase with airport baggage handlers flinging it about. Plus there’s lots all the netbooks can do that the iPad can’t as standard. Like back up your holiday pictures. Anyhow the job didn’t work out so it never did get to travel, except on our recent hols, & we just don’t use it at home so it’s a nice, but now non-essential extra for us. Or put it another way-the GF fucked up. AGAIN.

Link to Samsung’s site:
Support for NP-N150 although that is a slightly diff model. So far as I can tell this one doesn’t have the inbuilt bluetooth. I’ve included a brand new small bluetooth USB adaptor which gives you that functionality back. Otherwise best not mention the dual core, the slightly improved screen & doubtless something else. Mind you all that does cost power so maybe I’m on the right lines.

Don’t forget this is a netbook you are looking at. They all have fractionally smaller keyboards, screens & NO optical drive. Otherwise it would be called a notebook. If you were expecting this please consider a toaster & removal from the gene pool.

Good Things. We bought this Samsung Factory installed with genuine XP Home (see sticker on the base), which is ideal for one of these. Win7 starter is almost as good (but you can’t alter the look of your desktop with that) but XP has the smaller footprint. Win 7 full would use pretty much all of the RAM even if you upgraded it just to run & we won’t even mention Vista. The whole point of these is to travel light but do lots. You don’t want most of your resources hogged by the OS itself. Ah-& you don’t get to suffer that annoying UAC plagues you as well. FWIW all of the complaints on Amazon about these being slow are down to Win7 & insufficient RAM. Easy & cheap enough to put more in (max=2GB) but I never felt the need. In short XP is what these netbooks were designed for & Microsoft then stripped Win7 right down so it could just about run on them. That’s marketing for you. Actually no it isn’t. I made most of that up-now that’s marketing.

Full proper MS Office Professional 2003, so usual Word, Exel & PowerPoint, plus FrontPage, Publisher & the powerful Access database that isn’t on the non-pro. Now you can do some proper work. I’ve tried openoffice & the other free alternative. It’s horrible & all your formatting disappears if you open it in Office proper. Yes, I did learn this the hard way.

Condition is virtually mint-it still has the protective film on the lid. Touchpad is very responsive-can’t see what the few complaints in some reviews of this are on about, although this does have all the latest drivers from Samsung installed which the review models wouldn’t have at the time. On top of that most of the amazon reviews & def feedback on ebay is written by people who need a diagram for how to use what is inbetween their legs.

Screen has very good contrast & the text is very clear. Goes very bright indeed if you want it so. Yes, desparate line.

Keyboard is in white & has large stylish flat keys. I can type on it almost as fast as I can on my office PC. It’s a UK machine so the @, £ & $ keys are where you’d expect them to be, which they aren’t on an import. A small detail that drives you round the twist as I found out on a near previous purchase-watch out for that! Yep-that was the NC10 mistake I made myself a year earlier. Round the twist? I nearly took the wood axe to it.

I left it to run the battery down properly over the weekend (as you should every so often) & it was on from 4pm & still had 8% left at 11pm when I went to bed. That’s with no power saving options selected & IMO excellent. Most people never look after the battery & you’ll be very fortunate indeed to see that on other used ones of these. This is true enough. About the only thing that is..

It does have monitor out port so if you really wanted you can stuff a full sized monitor on, plug in a full width keyboard/mouse & type away like a professional. Can’t say I’ve ever bothered but it could do it if you needed it. Unlike an iP.. desperate Ed,

Extras-the usual essentials really. Avast anti-virus, Malware Bytes, Spybot, Ccleaner (really useful cleaner), Firefox, Chrome, Opera, a load of games & some other useful utilities. Freeware we all know but it’s on there, updated as is everything else so you’re good to go as soon as you unpack it rather than spend ½ a morning putting it on.
Also Genuine Canon Driver & Software utils for transferring & adjusting photos for all their digital cameras. You can’t download that-you have to have the CD that comes with the camera. Very useful.
Over 6GB of my fav music-I’ll let that be a nice surprise for you. It’s no slouch on sound quality either-we tried putting it through the living room system & it sounded great.
A clever little app called Sharepod which allows you to move music to & from your iPod without needing iTunes.
3 Modern Films (& a classic piece of french cinema involving a Ferrari in Paris)-inc Let Me In which is the best vampire film I’ve seen in years.
Kindle app & a couple of books to go along with it.
Samsung KIES for your lovely Galaxy phone.
All the Samsung Recovery & Utils that were installed at the Factory & these are also updated. Personally I’d remove them (effectively bloatware) but seeing as you’re paying for it you might as well have it & make your own mind up.
Forgot-it also has Cyberlink’s Power DVD (software) player on it as well which isn’t freeware. Although the VLC media player (also on it) is freeware & there is nothing I can find that VLC cannot handle. Again remember these do not have a DVD drive built in. And what a load of old waffle & BS that is. trans: have some of my GF's shite music & 3 girly films she ripped.

Bad Things. Slight rub on one corner from the slipcase if I had a magnifying glass & was being picky. My partner might have said it being Pink (what with him being a bloke, Grrr) but it didn’t stop him taking it when he last went down south. No inbuilt bluetooth, but I’ve inc a tiny brand new bluetooth USB dongle with this so that’s addressed. I’ve seen some griping on reviews about needing to upgrade the RAM to 2GB. As said earlier this runs XP & it’s adequate as it is for us. Prob the best bang for your buck (apart from disabling the windows search/indexing function** & removing the samsung software, which will cost you nothing) there is to speed it all up though. That’s it. That’s also true enough. I can barely see any mark but some wanker will bleat on about how it destroyed his life, gave the dog a bipolar condition & demand compo if I didn't point it out.


As a point of ref I wandered over to the power bar when we were waiting for the Eurostar train to Paris last month. The suits working there either had iPads & were 2 finger typing on screen with a titchy area left to see what they were doing, or netbooks like this. The best dressed ones did have full sized glorious laptops about 3mm thick, but those are a good £1000 plus! (Apple & Sony make them). And yes I’d fucking love one as much as I'd love f** that girlie in the pin stripe whistle.

Top travel tips: load on some films of your own, pack a lightweight Dsub monitor cable & use that big flatscreen TV that even the cheapest hotels now have as a monitor to watch your films on. You canna do that with an ipad either. I wouldn’t get too fixated on wireless speeds-continental (& UK) hotel internet speeds are appalling. Don’t forget your travel adaptor..(now you see why battery life is so important). S'good advice but looks like flannel & filler dere boy.

** Just remembered that my partner disabled the window indexing or search function on this. Now that really did speed it all up because it runs constantly. Much faster & you can find everything with the search companion anyhow. If the winning bidder would like him to start it running again just say-it’s only a few keystrokes. But really it’s so much better without it-I got him to do my own office computer as well. Also true enough & any idiot can do this. Took me an entire day to find out how myself though.

Last thing: no netbook comes with installation or backup CDs. Instead they put all this on the D partition of their hard drives. So what happens if the drive fails? You’re in trouble is what-so I strongly suggest that whatever netbook you win you run full back up or ghost the entire drive using either an external USB Hard Drive or onto a series of DVDs, using an external DVD writer or if you’re vaguely clever map the DVD drive from another computer on your home network onto it & use that. Personally on all ours we use either a Seagate or WD drive in a USB enclosure, which then allows you to use their versions of Acronis True Image to do it all easily. Natch of course I have done no such thing with this so for the love of god don’t fuck it up because I have no such copy at all.

Happy bidding & hope you’re as pleased with it as I was. Bet you will be! (i.e. as pleased as I will be to see the pointless pink fucker gone).


Usual shite about zero feedback, nigerian funds but an exception made for swapping my GF for a camel. We can do business there. In fact I'm begging you..

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Do think it'll sell?