The Netbook Thread

[dom]

I just placed an order for the black Eee 901 20 GB linux model from here:

http://www.superetrader.co.uk/asus-eee- ... -3426.html

They appear to be getting stock in soon:

"Stock: 1st delivery into the UK will be delivered by the end of week beginning 30th June (Friday 4th July). All preorders will be immediately shipped. Please place your order early to guarantee stock."

I live in hope, but I'm not holding my breath.

Dom

[Ely]

I have to get my Car Seviced on the 15th, so depending on how much it is will dictate whether I order one from my GFs work the day after. She works for a large Computer Supplies company, but I'm not saying which in the vain hope that they don't suddenly get lots of orders, and thus run out

[Kemper_Boyd]

The 8GB SSD Acer Aspire One for £219. It's not quite the £199 price but still a good
deal compared the the Eee 700s. August 11th according to Amazon, they have several
other models listed as well. It'll be interesting to see how cheap the Dell netbook is.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-One ... 001BZ920W/

[Dio]

Yeah, it got a very good review in PCW as well - mostly down to the slightly larger keyboard, although they reckoned the bigger battery was an essential, which at £80 makes the price a little less keen.

The One keyboard also has one (ha!) big advantage over the eee that I particularly look for - separate pageup/down keys rather than needing FN.

[moosedude]

went to pea sea wurld yesterday and say the avent 4211 micro laptop yesterday, next to the old eee model.

Runs windows XP and it looks fantastic the keyboard is better and the screen is bigger, XP seems very responsive as well. I could see myself installing visual studio on that and happily programming.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/editor ... int=home-1

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/2008 ... rices.html

[benedictw]

So, eee, the prices are going up then?

In other news, the Elonex One appears to have been canned (this was the 99 quid low end lappy) - its been replaced with the OneT - its a far more 'eee' like device than the one was. I've seen some people claiming the OneT is 129, but I've also seen people claiming its 179. At the low end - thats definately impulse buy territory, not bad even if it is a weird cpu, but at the high end its far too close in price to the original eee.

[F-ZeroOne]

Some advice please - I've ordered an Eee 901 because I want it to help me with my stumbling attempts at taking up astronomy. I'm interested in a Planetarium program called "Starry Night" but I'm not sure if the Eees on-board graphics are going to be up to the job. Heres what Starry Nights makers say is required for certain parts of the program:

"Windows: Requires Windows XP, 500 MHz or higher processor, 128 MB RAM and 2 GB of hard disk space. 64 MB OpenGL 1.4 capable graphics card (OpenGL 2.0 is required for features like shaded sky and animated grass). Minimum recommended monitor resolution of 1024x768. DVD-ROM drive required for installation."

The reason I'm interested is that apparently Starry Night will display an image that looks like what the actual sky looks like as your eyes see it, rather than just "white dots on a black background". I mean, yes, thats what stars look like, but...

[Dio]

Well, the res is 1024x600 which could be an issue, although you can probably put the desktop in panning mode and you'll be fine. The Intel GMA stuff that it comes with is total bobbins, but GL 1.4 is pretty old now and I'd have thought it should be OK.

[F-ZeroOne]

Thanks for the advice, but seeing as anything to do with astronomy is a bit pricey, is there a more definite answer?

[moosedude]

my eee came with software pre-installed called kstars - desktop planetarium, and that seems to run lovely, no idea how it compares though.

I wonder if theres a demo version of starry night for download, that I could test.. couldn't see anything on the website.

[xav]

I have Stellarium on my Linux boxes - it's in the Ubuntu repositories, but I don't know if it's in the Xandros repos for the EEE. Nevertheless, their website has downloads for Linux, Windows and Mac.

I run it on a 4-year-old desktop with a cheap NVidia graphics card, and a tablet PC with an even more worthless NVidia graphics card (so little RAM that it's blacklisted for running Compiz (though a quick file edit fixed that and it seems to run okay-ish)) - it works fine on both machines, so unless they've seriously crippled the EEE, I would expect it to run.

I don't know how accurate the appearance of the sky is in it - it seems accurate enough to me (stars have different luminosity and colour, at least). What it does have is a gorgeous mode for overlaying images of the constellations (looks a bit dim in this screenshot - it's clearer in real life):



Also check out some of the other screenshots on their site for a better idea of how it looks in use. If you want to take it stargazing with you, there's also a night-vision mode which switches the UI from white to red.

[phazey]

Just got interested in picking up one or two of these 701's (i think) for the Wife & Son (133UKP ish is the lowest i can find off the shelf), just wondered if anyone can confirm they will boot XP from a USB HDD. They (she & he)both have vastly different software tastes, so i want a separate disk for each of them. I want to save the internal storage just for chat/im when i am overseas on mission.

Thanks

[F-ZeroOne]

I have Stellarium on my Linux boxes - it's in the Ubuntu repositories, but I don't know if it's in the Xandros repos for the EEE. Nevertheless, their website has downloads for Linux, Windows and Mac.

I run it on a 4-year-old desktop with a cheap NVidia graphics card, and a tablet PC with an even more worthless NVidia graphics card (so little RAM that it's blacklisted for running Compiz (though a quick file edit fixed that and it seems to run okay-ish)) - it works fine on both machines, so unless they've seriously crippled the EEE, I would expect it to run.

I don't know how accurate the appearance of the sky is in it - it seems accurate enough to me (stars have different luminosity and colour, at least). What it does have is a gorgeous mode for overlaying images of the constellations (looks a bit dim in this screenshot - it's clearer in real life):



Also check out some of the other screenshots on their site for a better idea of how it looks in use. If you want to take it stargazing with you, there's also a night-vision mode which switches the UI from white to red.

Wow.

And thanks, guys - K-Stars appears to be Linux only, and I'm getting the Windows version. Yes, I know. Will have to check stellarium out.

[F-ZeroOne]

Just checked it out - bugger this staying outdoors and freezing the bits off, I'm going to stay inside and play with this!