The Netbook Thread

[HGFB]

Play.com have the EEE Box up for preorder

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/6059468/A ... oduct.html

[Ely]

I'm posting from my new Black 901 (Xp) seems to work okay

[Meatpuppet]

In oz at the mo', and passing through Singapore airport - picked up a new 1000 series
(80 gig HD/XP/1 gig Ram) for $850 (Singapore) - nice bit of kit

[Kemper_Boyd]

Lenovo Think^H^H^H^H^HIdeaPad S10.
http://www.geek.com/lenovo-introduces-i ... -20080804/

[xav]

Lenovo Think^H^H^H^H^HIdeaPad S10.
http://www.geek.com/lenovo-introduces-i ... -20080804/

From that article:

The $399 one will have 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive, while the $449 one will move to 1GB of RAM and an impressive 160GB of storage. Both will run Windows XP.

I thought Microsoft had imposed an upper limit of an 80GB hard drive (amongst various other arbitrary limits) for a netbook vendor to be allowed to install XP. Has this limit been changed?



One of my colleagues bought an Acer Aspire One (8GB SSD, Linux version) which arrived late last week. I had a brief play around with it, and was very impressed:

* The construction was very solid with a good hinge and deep gloss finish. It certainly didn't look like a cheap laptop
* It booted very quickly (~15 secs)
* The installed Linux distro (Linpus) seemed fairly well polished. It had a simple launcher, but a full menu of apps was available with a right-click on the desktop
* The WM is XFCE, which I'm not an expert in by any means. It would have been nice to have the apps menu in the bottom-left corner of the panel by default, but I suspect it can be added with a bit of config file editing
* The theme they've used for window decorations is extremely XP-like. At least that should prevent it scaring the locals
* Performance seemed pretty good - certainly better than a lot of the desktop machines we have to use here


In short, I was very impressed with it, though I would make a few tweaks to the software for my own use. If I had to buy a netbook right now, my £220 would probably go to Acer - though I would try loading it with Xubuntu and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but that's just my personal preference.

[Firefox]

http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/04/via- ... -on-video/

[Kemper_Boyd]

http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/04/via- ... -on-video/

The OpenBook has hardware video decoding as do netbooks using Atom and
the Poulsbo chipset.

[Kemper_Boyd]

If I had to buy a netbook right now, my £220 would probably go to Acer - though I would try loading it with Xubuntu and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but that's just my personal preference.

Snap. I just wish that they'd use higher capacity batteries. Too many
companies are using the lower power draw as an excuse for supplying a
low capacity battery rather than enabling a longer duration.

[DutchLlama]

I looked at the 1000 series, but one of the reasons I wanted an EEE was the solid-state drive, so I went for the 901 instead.

What the hell is the difference between the 900 and the 901? I have the first one and from reading the specs the 901 is the same model. Is it with XP instead of Linux?

[Firefox]

900 = Pentium M
901 = Atom

[DutchLlama]

Help, I fuX0red my EEE PC. After copying some files from my Archos 604 it b0rked and now it won't get past Starting System... I've tried every option in the BIOS, removed the battery for a few minutus and using the reset button but I can't get any further.

I need to reinstall it it seems.

Don't have a USB DVD drive nor a 4 Gb thumbdrive (only a 1 Gb one). The only things with enough storage I have are a 4Gb SDHC card (which I only can access on my PC when it's in my Palm Treo 500) and two external harddrives. Is it possible to use reinstall Xandros (or install XP) from those?

Otherwise I'm shafted, the only thing I can do is bring it back to the shops.

[Firefox]

There's some key combo you do to reinstall from the backup partition...

(edit) Here we go:

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/explain:f9_restore

[DutchLlama]

There's some key combo you do to reinstall from the backup partition...

(edit) Here we go:

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/explain:f9_restore

Thanks! That did the job nicely (except for losing some files, which aren't that important).

[DutchLlama]

901 has a different processor and various other tweaks I honestly don't remember now but they were enough to make me wait for it over the 900.

[edit] oh, the battery and power conservation, that was the other major thing that made me go for the 901. supposedly get 7+ hours out of a charge. haven't used it much yet to test that out, though

Oh damn wish I had known about that. I love long battery times.

Still 2.5 hours isn't that bad. Is the keyboard any better? The 900's one isn't that great for typing for a prolonged time.

[Misfit]

Minibook at £170....

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?Tab ... 32&doy=6m8

Not heard of it until a Register story today.