The Netbook Thread

[GeeZa]

I finally had a look at a bunch of them last week. There's no way I could settle for the keyboard on the eee 900s, but the 1000 and the Aspire One were far better, particularly the latter. The problems with the Acer are the 1G limit on the SODIMM slot and having to have the better battery (without buying it separately). Decisions, decisions...

I went for the Aspire One just because it felt a bit nicer than the others overall, nice keyboard, sturdy build, good screen etc. You're totally right about the memory limit (and it's a shit to upgrade) and the battery is almost laughably rubbish. For the money though (it was about $320 including next-day shipping from Newegg when I bought it) I thought it was good value overall. Might be worth waiting to see new models from the various manufacturers? I hear some noises that some of them are thinking of dropping Linux altogether because apparently customers hate it.

[VNVObit]

Got used to the keyboard of the 900 and the 10" models just seem so close in size to a normal laptop they just seem to be neither one thing nor the other.7" was just too small but the 8.9" seems just about right (as the form factor is still nice and compact)

the eeePC was a bit of an impulse purchase for me but have found it extremely useful (just need to get the knowlegebase populated) for contracting

[Governmentyard]

How much would someone pay for an 'as new' 901 Linux?

I'm thinking of liquidating a number of assets.

[Governmentyard]

Scratch that, I've just installed Intrepid Ibex on it and the Adam's Kernel - runs like a bloody dream. Keeping.

[hukka]

I have a white 900 16G, the one with the slowest SSD drive of them all. It was fine with the Linux that came with it, but the NLited Windows XP I replaced it with was really annoying by default, pausing every now and then for a few seconds while Windows was writing to disk.

It's okay now, after disabling swap and indexing and unnecessary NTFS features and write-behind caching and Firefox history and cache. Explorer is still a bit laggy but it's well worth the 245 euro I spent on the thing. I read it'd be quicker with FAT32 but I'm not tweaking it any more for now.

[stealthbanana]

I went for the Aspire One just because it felt a bit nicer than the others overall, nice keyboard, sturdy build, good screen etc. You're totally right about the memory limit (and it's a shit to upgrade) and the battery is almost laughably rubbish. For the money though (it was about $320 including next-day shipping from Newegg when I bought it) I thought it was good value overall. Might be worth waiting to see new models from the various manufacturers? I hear some noises that some of them are thinking of dropping Linux altogether because apparently customers hate it.

Same here, I went for the Linux 120GB hard drive version. Bought a hi capacity battery for £50 that lasts over 6 hours or so. More memory would be nice, that's a project fro the weekend. I got rid of the linpus and stuck on ubuntu, works fine apart from the wifi LEDs, though I am sure some bright spark will fix that very soon. Having said that I am on my 3rd Aspire. Bought it from John Lewis, first one had something inside rattling about, they just gave me a new one. Had the second about 3 hours before I took it back, the webcam just was not working, not even seen by the system, no problem, another new one and this seems to work fine. Even came with the 3305 kernel installed already. Looking at the build date it is 2 months later model. Only thing I hate about it is the location of the touchpad keys, but a USB mouse fixes that.

[HGFB]

I have a white 900 16G, the one with the slowest SSD drive of them all. It was fine with the Linux that came with it, but the NLited Windows XP I replaced it with was really annoying by default, pausing every now and then for a few seconds while Windows was writing to disk.

I got really sick of that and the slow speed of the second SSD so I've ordered a 1000H with a 80gig harddisk.

[CableTwitch]

Whee, got myself the XP version of the 1000 with the 160gig HDD (I'd rather have the storage than the extra cost and less space of the SSD version). Its a lovley little machine, but does come with a plethora of rather non-essential software. That all said, its not really been through many hoops yet, on account of me not having been able to push it hard (Out and about, with only the default software so far).

The one thing that puzzles me though, is that every so often it seems to get the S key stuck. Now from what I can make out, its not actually the key itself being stuck, as it moves freely and nothing presses on it when the lisd is shut. Maybe its just windows confusing itself, maybe there is something amiss here. Oddly enough, its also done it at least once with the lid open. It'll go back if it doesnt stop, its brand new and all.

The screen is pretty nice, plenty of view angle, decent colours, and usable resolution. Not sure what the res of previous models is, but this is 1024x600. It can do higher, but it'll scroll. Soundwise its fairly good for a small device, with only the usual bass squashing problems inherant to most laptops/sub-noties. HDD access is fairly punchy, wont be as fast as the SSD, granted, but I imagine it'll trounce the write times

The usual gig of DDR2 is stuff in there, and will probably be fine for the time being, but if its possible, I may look to cramming a 2gig SODIMM in there eventually. All depends on what I end up using it for. Suspending to RAM thankfully doesnt induce the coma that I usually manage to achieve on systems with this feature.

The only minor pissy point is the rather naff trackpad and buttons, but hey, its usable. And its nice that it doesnt rely on the wireless as its sole network connection too. Now to get used to the keyboard...

Anyway, this wasnt intended to be a review as such, just me being all happy and such with my new toy. Time to push it harder, methinks...

[Dio]

Suspending to RAM thankfully doesnt induce the coma that I usually manage to achieve on systems with this feature.

With XP, I've found the one thing that's almost guaranteed to cause major spasming on restart from suspend is the USB stack. If anything changes state while it's off, it usually sticks or bluescreens. So if you're going to suspend to move the machine, always pull the mouse or USB key out first and make sure you put them back in after you restore.

The extra HD space is tempting but one of the attractive things for me is the whole no-moving-parts thing. I suppose the cost of a new small HD isn't that much...

[dom]

I specifically bought the Eee 901 because it has no moving parts (aside from the fan, of course), but 20 GB of storage, i.e. enough for an all-round useful machine. The size is a major bonus too.

I discovered that http://array.org/ubuntu/ has an excellent Ubuntu custom kernel which makes all the hardware Just Work, details here. Perhaps they will incorporate these changes into the next version of Ubuntu.

[PurpleChair]

Judging from the news I've read recently, there's going to be a sort of planetary alignment of netbooks, ARM processors, and Ubuntu coming next year.

[Dio]

ARM should be perfect for a netbook, but there is one use where there will probably be a big downside - playing video. Even if it's got SIMD hardware they'll need people to put a hell of a lot of work in on the codecs before it will be up to scratch on the video side. The amount of tuning that's gone into the SSE paths for these things is just massive, and there's dozens of different codebases that will need to get fixed.

Might get very interesting if they stick the Imagination video core in there too mind.

[Yak]

I wouldn't go back to spinny metal in my lappy. For general being carted about daily usage I want no mooving parts. I love my 901 and if I shouold need to take much more stuff anywhere a few gig of SD is cheap as chips these days.

Besides, having to have a fragile little electromechanical gramophone thing in your tech is just so 20th century.

[CableTwitch]

Suspending to RAM thankfully doesnt induce the coma that I usually manage to achieve on systems with this feature.

With XP, I've found the one thing that's almost guaranteed to cause major spasming on restart from suspend is the USB stack. If anything changes state while it's off, it usually sticks or bluescreens. So if you're going to suspend to move the machine, always pull the mouse or USB key out first and make sure you put them back in after you restore.

Well, to date, it hasnt gone comatose when USB devices have been removed in suspend, so maybe SP3 fixed this, or maybe Ive just been lucky. The only major odd thing to occur is a BSOD after messing with winamp, which I havent been able to recreate, so I'm going to assume that was down to some random cosmic radiation playing silly buggers with the CPU.

Still, its doing really well, the only niggle now is the horrendous bluetooth software that badgers me for a secure connection each and every fucking time despite me having already told it that my phone is authorised to auto-connect. This is the next goal to be fixed.

[Dio]

so maybe SP3 fixed this

It doesn't. Sure, it could be a hardware issue on my machine, but that's what I've found anyway.