Hi Lisi,
I seem to recall being able to play DVDs on my 400 Mhz Pentium II with 192
Mb RAM back in the day (running Windows 2k - I had to as I played Half Life
Day of Defeat a lot). That was from a PATA drive though and not through USB.
I don't know exactly how the current netbook cpu Mhz would compare to the
PII Mhz, but I'm guessing it should be able to play them OK. Can you not
take an external USB DVD drive and a DVD down to a store and try to play it
with something like VLC?
I've been playing with Damn Small Linux on my xbox and it seems to cope well
with only 64Mb RAM so perhaps you could give that a go if you want something
really light. It supposedly runs on 486 machines with 16Mb of RAM! Only 2.4
kernel though...
What do you classify as a 'reasonable' price? Maplin have some refurbished
thing<
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=228796&source=1&C=Maplin&U=HomeBasketFillers&T=228796>on
their web site for £100 although I don't know how good it is.
HTH,
Stuart.
2009/2/23 Lisi <hantslug@???>
> I have been asked by a young friend whether it is possible to watch DVDs
> (films etc.) on a netbook. I suspect that the answer is no, even with an
> external DVD-ROM drive, because of lack of system resources. But I would
> be
> grateful for some accurate information on this point from the list.
>
> I have googled and cannot find a netbook at a reasonable price (one of the
> reasons she is interested in netbooks is the low price) that has an
> internal
> DVD drive. Would anyone who knows otherwise be kind enough to post a link
> or
> tell me the model?
>
> Meanwhile, she is keen on having one with a Linux OS, and is very taken
> with
> the idea of using Tux to resurrect her present ailing laptop. She has gone
> home with a selection of Live CDs to have a look. :-))
>
> TIA
> Lisi
>
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