Netbooks

Poststructural Pub
1

So I’m thinking about getting one of these netbooks that are all the rage just now. Anyone got one? If so which one and how is it?

I was looking at either the Acer Aspire One or the Asus EEE PC 901

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/18/review_acer_aspire_one/
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/17/review_eee_pc_901/

The best reviews are for the MSI Wind, but it’s kinda pricey:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/20/review_msi_wind/

I just think this would be perfect to carry around with me for checking the web while out and about or doing some writing away from the flat. Even just for surfing in my living room when I can’t be bothered getting my big laptop out and doing anything too hardcore.

Just need to persuade myself I can afford it…

2

Depends. This market is going to change very, very quickly. The company I
work for is putting out a chip that (IMO) will eat the Intel Atom’s lunch as
far as speed and battery life are concerned. Also, it looks like people are
moving toward building small devices (like PDAs and Smarphones) with
processing power to rival laptops, which could be plugged into a laptop-like
“docking station” when you need a keyboard/mouse/screen. I have a feeling
the pricing will change in the next year or two as these advances come out.
But it’s a neat piece of kit as it stands.

3

I just don’t see the smartphone and PDA market having that kind of impact. The manufacturers have been trying to get them into mass usage for years without any significant success.

I’ve had a PDA from work for 2 years and never figured out anything useful to do with it. The thing’s just too small and windows mobile is rubbish.

But I agree with you that the netbook market is changing quickly, hell it didn’t even exist a year ago.

At £200 for the Aspire One I could justify buying it and replacing it in a year or so though.

4

I’m starting to want one of these, too. Until a few months ago, our house was only hardwired to the web with a desktop. Then the writer wife decided she could be much more productive with a laptop, and she was right. I’m getting a bit envious…and these little laptops appeal to me much more than a normal size laptop.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a serious need for one - it’d be most handy when traveling for work to check email and surf the web in the evening.

If you buy one, and don’t like it, feel free to send it my way…

Eric

5

I very much am interested in this trend. I think size and weight really is quite critical. I never enjoyed using laptops, and so rarely did, until I bought a MacBook. Putting aside the OS wars (mine boots into either Windows XP or the Mac OS), I think the smaller size and light weight really made the difference.

6

What do we think about this?

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9

7

Too expensive (starts at £299 in the UK, £100 more than the basic Acer in some shops) for my tastes. Though the battery is better than the Acer.

For £300 I’d really be hoping for 1Gb of RAM and more storage.

8

That’s where the laptop docking station and Linux comes in. Also, with
higher processing power, standard Windows may be run on small devices.
I think the real coup will be once HDTV is standard in the US next year,
and someone comes out with an HDMI connector for PDAs. Then they’re
essentially roving DVRs.

Boy, those ACERs are pretty darn cheap, though.

9

On a similar subject, there’s a company here in Utah that is creating a laptop that would contain no long term storage, no cpu, just ram, a simple BIOS, a screen, USB ports, and a few other geegobs.
The processing and main os duities will be handled by your smartphone.

I’d only been to their site once, and that was at school; my programming instructor pointed this company out. FOr the life of me I cant seem to find their website or even remember the company’s name and my google searches are yielding no fruit.

10

Hi

For many years I ran my life on one of these:

Psion Series 5 Palmtop Computer

I used it for all my e-mail and just about everything else except for image processing. I wrote several magazine articles and a major part of a book on it. The keyboard was excellent and I could touch type at around 90% of the speed I get on a full size keyboard. For a period when I was a taxi driver I did my accounts on it.

The OS (EPOC) was rock solid, and turning it off and on brought me back to exactly where I left it with no wait. It needed rebooting a couple of times per year, but only when I crashed it because I was developing software on it and also alfa- and betatesting software for others. It ran forever on two NiMH penlight cells.

I used it much more than the PC for exactly the same reason I play more whistle than clarinet. It was always right there ready to use, no waiting time, no assembly, just pick it up and play. And, for someone living on a boat, the very low power consumption compared to a laptop was also an issue. On a boat you generate your own electricity. The more you use, the more you have to generate.

So, what happened to Psion? They made two bad mistakes. First of all, they screwed up their marketing in the USA, and secondly, they never released a version with a colour screen. The power users didn’t want a colour screen because we liked the loooooong battery life, but the mass market wanted colour.

Back to the subject of the thread. I’ve been looking seriously at the EEEPC. A major part of what appeals to me is that it runs direct off 12V and has low power consumption, so it is easy to feed on the boat. I will, unfortunately have to run Windows on it as there are two mission critical applications I need that are not available on Linux, but of course I can dual boot it and have Linux too.

There is a lot of information on the EEEPC forums about tweaking this little guy to increase storage space, improve the wifi etc. etc.

Regards,

Owen Morgan

Yacht Magic
Anchored in the lagoon, St Maarten

My new blog.
Click here for my latest reported position. (Use the satellite view.)

11

I’ve recently discovered that Tesco are advertising the Dell Inspiron mini-9 with linux for £230, which if they stick to is very tempting. I’ll find out on Oct 6th if it’s true.

Otherwise I’ll just buy an Acer for £200

12

I’m extremely skittish of Dells. My wife got a dell laptop a few years ago and it worked great for about six months then it became ungodly slow. We’ve gone through the registry and deledted that crap Norton and other useless spyware and it’s never worked right since.

13

Tesco have updated the price today anyway and added another £20, making it not quite as attractive. Still better battery life, bluetooth and more memory might still make it a better buy than the Acer, who themselves don’t have a stellar customer service rep.

14

The Register have produced a buyers guide:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/12/rh_bg_netbooks/

15

Toshiba have announced their netbook effort:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/18/toshiba_unveils_netbook/

Rumoured to cost about the same as a higher spec Acer Aspire One and the low spec Dell if that turns out to be true then the better build quality of the Tosh could win me over when it’s out next month.

It’s getting harder and harder to make my mind up.

16

Because it briefly appeared at a reduced price on the amazon.co.uk website the week before christmas I decided to make the leap and bought an Acer Aspire One with 1gb ram, 120gb hard drive and Linux.

So far I think it’s a brilliant little thing, with the only problem being the amount of time it’s taking me to tweak it to my satisfaction. But this is because of one of the upsides, I get to learn a new operating system just geek out with it. If anyone tells you that it’s possible to pick up a laptop with linux on it and you can start using it straight away like a windows machine without any tech knowledge then they’re lying.

I enjoy this kind of stuff and expected it to be a bit of a slog finding the apps I wanted and getting them to work, but I imagine many people wouldn’t.

17

I wonder if maybe it’s just a difference between the 2 types of Linux. Mine with Ubuntu 8.04 took very little adjustment to get used to. I think that Acer has been using something different called Limpus Lite.
I will say though that I’ve had mixed results trying to add apps. Dell’s made a version of Ubuntu 8.04 that’s “optimized” for netbooks, which really means it’s crippled. It seems to be missing some normal features like a code line. Most of the apps I’ve looked at (like the one that gives you the toolbar that looks like the one for Mac OSX) seem to require inputting specific lines of code.

18

Nah it’s not a problem with Linpus, and I’ve had much less trouble with this than when I put Ubuntu on my main laptop. At least the wireless works out of the box this time!

It’s just that for the vast majority of user customisation or even a lot of program installation tasks you need to use the terminal. This is something that many people who aren’t very technical and are only used to windows will feel completely ill at ease in doing. Remembering text commands and their associated switches is something that went out when dos stopped being the backend to windows.

Like I say, I don’t mind it. I touch type and am a card carrying geek, this is WHY I bought a Linux model. So I could get stuck into the guts of the thing and have a bit of fun without worrying about killing my expensive workhorse laptop. This is a cheap thing I carry in my bag, it’s not the end of the world if I accidentally break it for a short while.

But I’ve seen a few posts on the acer aspire one users forum from people who bought linux models at christmas because they believed they could do everything they did on windows machines but they didn’t properly understand what they were buying and are now confused, unable to do what they want with their machine and lack the technical knowledge to understand why. I also heard a statistic about the number of linux netbooks that were being returned to the shops to have XP installed on them. It was quite a big number.

Out of the box I could connect to the internet, write a document and open spreadsheets. Many people won’t get much further than that to be fair, but everyone else should buy a windows machine or be prepared to get their hands dirty.

19

Limpus Lite seems to be a RedHat/Fadora based distribution with the RPM package management, so itIt should be able to use the standard RPM repository. IT doesn’t have the graphical interface installed for adding new programs? Is that why it it is “lite”.

Hmm, it seems that even with a GUI, simple programs like Xroach would have to be manually modified (in this case for newer clock speeds) to make them work well.

20

It does have yum and a package manager tied to the Fedora repository included. But, that still doesn’t mean that I can avoid using the terminal.