Netbooks

[Elxx]

My aging HP tx1000 seems to be ready to kick the bucket soon - I've already had to replace the heatsink/fan once, and this past weekend, one of the RAM slots apparently stopped working which kicked me down to 1gb and the looming possibility of the second one dying as well. Thus, I've begun the search for a new laptop.

When I bought the tx1000 in the spring of 2007, I was looking for something similar to the netbooks of today - portability was more important than performance. I've got a workhorse desktop that handles everything, I just need a laptop for note taking in classes and quick internet access when travelling. It cost me quite a premium - $1100 - to get something that small in that age, but it was totally worth it and the touchscreen was a sexcellent addition. The tx1000 has served me well, but the battery life is less than stellar - barely 2 hours with the stock battery, and the higher capacity ones jut out the side and make the whole thing ugly and unwieldy.

Today, netbooks seem to be all the rage and now I'm looking to get one. I'm looking specifically at the Asus Eee 1000HE - it's their newest model, and the battery life looks excellent. So my question for you guys is, do any of you have netbooks, and what do you think of them?

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Netbooks

I dont own onemyself (although i would quite like one) but the most popular ones seem to be the acer ones. Especially the version with linux, there is a huge tweaking community for the OS!

There is however, a few new things on the horizen for example the Nvidia ION platform and the AMD netbook-like platform (forgotten the name) which will promise you a little bit more power in the GPU department.

[imported_Bullet Magnet]

Re: Netbooks

Real simple, get an MSi Wind U100.

Easy to mod (at the minimum, spend the $10-20 for an extra GB of RAM, easy to install) and COMPANY-GENERATED-AND-WARRANTEED BIOS update gives you up an additional 24% performance. Check out the MSi Wind forums, modders there have installed touch screens and even a Garmin GPS. I have one, dual boots OS X and XP. Yes, you can game on it as well, Guild Wars runs excellent.

[peeth]

Re: Netbooks

I have an asus eee pc901, the default linux ti comes with (heavily modified xandros) is not brilliant, and so after a few months of use i decided to switch to xubuntu (i like xfce more than GNOME or KDE) and it is better, with jsut light word processing with wifi off i get 5 to 8 hours, upto 4 with it on.

[Trevortt]

Re: Netbooks

The Samsung Netbooks are also like the MSI Wind's...

http://www.cclonline.com/product-cat...ategory_id=893

[Elxx]

Re: Netbooks

The Samsung Netbooks are also like the MSI Wind's...

http://www.cclonline.com/product-cat...ategory_id=893

Ooh, I didn't know Samsung does netbooks. They seem to have pretty much the same specs as the Eee I was looking at, but for $75 more.

Thank you all for your comments! I've looked at the Wind and some of Acer's offerings, but that nice battery life on the Eee 1000HE is really drawing me in. Not to mention Asus was the pioneer of the netbook, and the Eee already has a big established fanbase. Bullet Magnet, what's the battery life like on your Wind?

[imported_Bullet Magnet]

Re: Netbooks

3-4 hours with the 6-cell battery. FYI, there is a 9-cell battery available via Ebay for it, from what I've read it gets up to 8 hours.

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Netbooks

sticks out the back like an huge bump on the head though lol

[Xylaquin]

Re: Netbooks

3-4 hours with the 6-cell battery. FYI, there is a 9-cell battery available via Ebay for it, from what I've read it gets up to 8 hours.

you'd be lucky to get 3-4hours with the default battery. I run XP SP3, classic theme, and only AVG as an additional startup program. I usually get around 2hours tops with that.

Although to be fair that's with my wifi enabled.

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Netbooks

XP is quite a bit more power hungry than linux as it uses more ram and CPU when idle.

The samsung netbooks a bit pricey but they are damned nice! a mate of mine has one and its just lovely

[imported_Bullet Magnet]

Re: Netbooks

you'd be lucky to get 3-4hours with the default battery. I run XP SP3, classic theme, and only AVG as an additional startup program. I usually get around 2hours tops with that.

Although to be fair that's with my wifi enabled.

Really? I'm getting right at 3 hours, exact same setup as you, with an extra GB of RAM. WiFi on all the time as well.

[CptainCrunch]

Re: Netbooks

I dont own one but know about five people that do and they really love them. They do the basics very well (word, excel, powerpoint, internet, email) and they come in a lot of features and options. There are some lines that will using usb RAM drives as extra storage and utilities will actually run from them. Some come with a linux, if thats your thing, or full blown Windows.

All the guys I know have the newer HP models. A few have some of the older versions of netbooks and they had display problems, so you might stay clear of those. You can tell they are older versions because they are not on the HP website anymore

Bottom line is you can get a lot out of them for the same price as a very high end video card.

Crunch

[AlecJ32]

Re: Netbooks

XP is quite a bit more power hungry than linux as it uses more ram and CPU when idle.

Power Management comes down to more than just how much resources the operating system uses, though. XP doesn't really have a good Power Management interface, so Linux would probably be a better choice than XP. However, Vista (Not ideal for netbooks, therefore I don't recommend you use it) or Windows 7 have a lot of power management features which may improve your battery life despite the increased resource use. I don't own a netbook, so I can't really say from first hand experience which is better.

It probably comes down to which distro you use, as well. Super lightweight Linux distributions might be better on your batter, while something fat and bloated like Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu would probably suck it down.

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Netbooks

Even Ubuntu Kubuntu and Xubuntu are still lighter than windows, im running it on a 1.6 E1200 with 1GB ram and for general use its just as fast as my quad machine with 4GB ram running windows.

The company that does the buntu distributions are working on a version of linux specifically for Netbooks atm so it might be worth keeping an eye out for.

[AlecJ32]

Re: Netbooks

Even Ubuntu Kubuntu and Xubuntu are still lighter than windows, im running it on a 1.6 E1200 with 1GB ram and for general use its just as fast as my quad machine with 4GB ram running windows.

Lighter than Windows? Not really. Xubuntu maybe, but when you're running a distro like Ubuntu or Kubuntu on a low end PC, it runs just as poorly as Windows XP/Windows 2000. For using a kernel as robust and scalable as the Linux kernel, they sure don't work to well on low end PCs.