The Netbook Thread

dom · Post by **dom** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 6:25 pm 0

phazey wrote: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

My 701 sees the SD card as a secondary disk, so I imagine you could install XP onto there.

VNVObit · Post by **VNVObit** » Sat Jul 19, 2008 12:01 am 0

has anyone registered recently for the replacement battery for the 900?
just wondering how long it takes

dom · Post by **dom** » Tue Jul 29, 2008 1:05 pm 0

I'm still waiting for my Linux 901 (yes, I know I've got a 701, I'm selling it to my dad)... the vendor (www.superetrader.co.uk) has a note on the product page to say they should be getting stock on yesterday; I just spoke to them and they reckon it'll be a couple weeks yet, but the guy told me that they are surprised at the delays, as there hasn't been any reason provided by ASUS as to why they aren't making stock of the Linux 901 available.

Anyone know why this is delayed and how long for?

cheers

Dom

Ely · Post by **Ely** » Tue Jul 29, 2008 1:44 pm 0

I'm waiting for my 901 XP from Jacqui's work, Misco.co.uk (not that they are on the Misco Website yet :-) Supposed to be due last week, and now it's this week. I'll believe it when she brings home a eeePC sized box and put it down in front of me!

Yak · Post by **Yak** » Tue Jul 29, 2008 1:48 pm 0

I guess I was lucky with my 901 (XP). Ordered from Supertrader the day before they were due to arrive in the UK, figured I'd be back in the queue of preorders and have to wait a while, and I had it on the Monday.

Really like the machine, nice form factor and awesome battery life and not stupidly expensive. Apple should take note.

Darth Bungle · Post by **Darth Bungle** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 11:06 pm 0

It looks like there are 901 XP's in stock in quite a few places now, I just ordered a 20gb linux 901 from Amazon, shipping date 11th August apparently...

I hope that date is accurate, I was very tempted to get the XP one but I don't mind (too much) about having to wait to get the extra storage space for free. Although given that you can get 8gb sd cards for 15 quid it's not saving too much....

Dio · Post by **Dio** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 11:23 pm 0

Interesting performance results knocking around today, with the VIA Nano beating the Atom quite handily (20-30%) - but at the cost of a lot more power...

Yak · Post by **Yak** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 12:37 am 0

It's the battery life (and form factor) that are key to me though. Power - well, yeah, I wish it could run Neon, but for most of the stuff I actually use it for it's fine. I have to go to Brighton tomorrow and I'll be able to spend a couple of hours of that time playing Megadrive games on Snakey's excellent emu and still have power left over for what I need to do there and for the trip back. And it's the right size - Apple made a typically Apple mistake with the Air thing by making it technically impressive but still just as annoying as a conventional machine - what I don't like about carrying a lappy is that it's big and flappy, and big and flappy and *thin* isn't really an advantage, *plus* it's underpowered and not that great at battery and is only really the domain of rich showoffs rather than actually being any *good*.

I loved the Libretto when that was around - small so that carrying it is less of a pain, and actually useful, if not wafer-thin. And I like the Eee 901 for the same reasons, plus it has an ace battery, I routinely get double the time out of that little thing than I do out of most lappies I've known. And it doesn't take the piss with the price. It's good to see more machines like that coming out, and I hope the likes of Apple and Sony do take note. Being small shouldn't, and doesn't mean that it's OK to add 800 quid to the price. I was in PC Wrold and there was some Sony subnotebook that was wanting Â£1600 and I just laughed

.

More of this sort of thing please

.

Dio · Post by **Dio** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 12:46 am 0

Well, generally I couldn't agree more. Ever since the eee's turned up I've been laughing at the prices Sony think they can get away with for their midget machines.

Firefox · Post by **Firefox** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 1:06 am 0

Dio wrote:Interesting performance results knocking around today, with the VIA Nano beating the Atom quite handily (20-30%) - but at the cost of a lot more power...

Bit disappointed that the Nano's reference mini-ITX board only accepts 4GB of SDRAM and only in a single channel. I'd quite like to build a low-power machine for non-gaming use; I don't need more speed than the Nano but I would like as much RAM as possible now it's so cheap.

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 9:56 am 0

Dio wrote:Interesting performance results knocking around today, with the VIA Nano beating the Atom quite handily (20-30%) - but at the cost of a lot more power...

20-30% faster for 25W vs. 4W is awful for a 'low power' processor.
Atom is a far better low power processor. It's not as though Nano
is going to be cheaper, Intel can thrash Via there as well.

Firefox · Post by **Firefox** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 10:56 am 0

Kemper_Boyd wrote:
Dio wrote:Interesting performance results knocking around today, with the VIA Nano beating the Atom quite handily (20-30%) - but at the cost of a lot more power...
20-30% faster for 25W vs. 4W is awful for a 'low power' processor.
Atom is a far better low power processor. It's not as though Nano
is going to be cheaper, Intel can thrash Via there as well.

Were you bitten by a Via chip when you were young?

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 11:15 am 0

No, I think Nano fails to meet the needs of the markets it's made for.
It's not fast, it's not cheap and it's not low power. What is Nano for?
Intel, and AMD as well, have many processors that look better by
just about any criteria I can think of.

This is a good summary and will save me writing something similar.
http://aceshardware.freeforums.org/benc ... .html#7254

zip accident · Post by **zip accident** » Fri Aug 01, 2008 7:21 pm 0

I came across this on /..

Interesting, Neh?

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Fri Aug 01, 2008 7:54 pm 0

Benchmarks using CPUID to pick code paths has been controversial
for years. It can be used as a course check for some optimisations,
but identification of specific CPU features would be required to achieve
the highest bandwidth. Bandwidth is influenced by things like cache line
sizes, write combining, number of queued operations, and sometimes
instruction types can in effect increase the word/register size.

PC Mark is not giving Via it's best shot but then again neither will 99%
of real world applications. It is worth noting that changing the ID did
not improve the CPU scores.

Measured memory bandwidth from RAM is not as significant as you might
at first think. It is the effective bandwidth that matters and that is due
to memory caching. Well optimised code can see the bandwidth to memory
drop as the cache is more efficiently used.

If you want to measure CPU performance use a SPEC benchmark or your
own code. PCMark is not a serious benchmark.

YakYak

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