The Netbook Thread

[piku]

It seriously handles VS2005 and SQL Server... at the same time, without grinding to a crawl? And you can cope with developing on the tiny screen?

Would it cope with XNA Game Studio?

I'm running VS2008 with XNA 3.0 and it works fine. Performance wise it will obviously have issues if you really push it, but in testing I'm shifting several hundred sprites with pixel shaders etc and having no problems.

The tiny screen is obviously something of a compromise in the editor, but have all your Solution Explorer, Properties windows etc auto-hide, and I find it perfectly usable. (FWIW I get around 25 lines of code on screen and width isn't an issue at all.)

That's cool

[moosedude]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/10 ... t_laptops/





and the Asus Eee Top ET1602 PC, the touchscreen thingy.

http://www.computing.co.uk/vnunet/hardw ... top-et1602

[benedictw]

Crikey some of those concept lappys are nice.

[VNVObit]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/10/ces_asus_concept_laptops/


Snip

That is a nice design alright

[Cloudane]

Reminds me a little of the sliding keyboard design of the Psion 5, which would be a nice design to resurrect.

[Dio]

Acer Aspire One, 512M / 120G, blue - £150 at ASDA get. For that price I could stop thinking about whether I want it or the Samsung, and just get the bloody thing and have a play with it before considering whether to spend money on the bigger battery and / or an SSD or to get something else.

Yes. £150 inc. One hundred and fifty pounds. Less than eight purple beer tokens. It's absolutely billy bonkers money.

I had to ask, mind, there were none on the shelves I could find, but they had them in the back.

Edit: and it seems that despite what's on the box, it's a 160G drive, and this is normal on these models!

[benedictw]

I got an Aspire One for my daughter - its truly a lovely machine. 150 quid? Thats insane money.

[Dio]

The mrs' goddaughter was quite astonished to find that I coveted the Aspire One she got for chrimbo. Well, now I got me own...

Pain in the tits to have to dismantle the whole thing to get at the sodimm slot though.

[PumaG]

Acer Aspire One, 512M / 120G, blue - £150 at ASDA get. For that price I could stop thinking about whether I want it or the Samsung, and just get the bloody thing and have a play with it before considering whether to spend money on the bigger battery and / or an SSD or to get something else.

Yes. £150 inc. One hundred and fifty pounds. Less than eight purple beer tokens. It's absolutely billy bonkers money.

!

I got the Dell mini 9 from Tescos for £185, well chuffed with it as didn't want hard disk, build quality is superb.

[moosedude]

It seriously handles VS2005 and SQL Server... at the same time, without grinding to a crawl? And you can cope with developing on the tiny screen?

Would it cope with XNA Game Studio?

I'm running VS2008 with XNA 3.0 and it works fine. Performance wise it will obviously have issues if you really push it, but in testing I'm shifting several hundred sprites with pixel shaders etc and having no problems.

The tiny screen is obviously something of a compromise in the editor, but have all your Solution Explorer, Properties windows etc auto-hide, and I find it perfectly usable. (FWIW I get around 25 lines of code on screen and width isn't an issue at all.)

That's cool

Nice, I've just tried to import a directX 9 application (fairly basic, render this polygon with this texture) but having some troubles getting it working.. grrr.

[GeeZa]

Finally got round to installing Ubuntu 8.10 on the Aspire One and added the Netbook Remix GUI:



Pretty impressed. It's quick, user-friendly, and turns the thing into a proper computer without leaving behind what makes these Netbooks good. Only downside was getting Wifi working which was frankly infuriating in classic Linux style. Chuffed it's all working now though.

[piku]

The Aspire One plays Quake too rather nicely.

[ThetaReactor]

Netbook Get!

Best Buy is selling HP Mini 1000s for $399. XP, 10" screen, 16GB SSD, plus the goofy little integrated USB key thing [2GB]. It's pretty damn nifty. Good keyboard. Gets a little warm in the lap, but the fan is the only moving part. I'm hoping I can get a copy of their tweaked MI linux interface once they hit the market, and I'll probably give the Ubuntu remix a try in the next day or so.

[Cloudane]

Liking my new 901 (upgraded from the 701) but boy is it a fingerprint magnet.

I was thinking about one of these: http://www.istyles.com/computing-asus-s ... 293e85bc2c
The only issue being that postage costs as much as the product itself! (from the USA) but a grand total of £16 isn't too bad...

Ordered one approximately a week ago, and it arrived today

The paperwork shows that it's actually from http://www.decalgirl.com and istyles is a reseller, but whatever, it's like 50p difference.

VERY impressed. The quality is such that it feels worth every penny of those £16, despite most of them being postage.

I had visions of some horrible cheap peely plastic that bubbles up and makes it look worse, and was prepared for "what do I prefer, fingerprints or bubbles and wrinkles and perhaps some fingerprints on that too" but no! It's perfect. Not thin, but not too thick either, just right.

Sticks and lifts like nothing I've seen before, and stays put (with no danger of peeling edges that I can see) once you've got it in the right place. Just sits on and somehow doesn't bubble at all even if you practically try to make it do so (I think it has small air pores, it has that sort of texture).

Despite being shiny, fingerprints don't show up at all.

I'm trying to think what it compares against, and the best I can come up with is those rubbery vinyl floors that people put in their bathrooms these days. Only a lot thinner of course.

Did I mention it looks awesome? Love it. Byebye fingerprints, you will not be missed.

[Dio]

So, after a couple of long train journeys with it, here's my thoughts on the Aspire One:

- It's great.
- The screen's very small and cramped, but perfectly usable. Most apps benefit from a bit of intense slimming down in the vertical direction. But even Visual Studio is usable with a lot of tweaks and rearrangement. Because you generally sit quite close to the thing, I've found font sizes that are a bit small usually are much more usable on it - I was able to knock the Emu debugger down from 10 and 8 point text to 8 and 6 without really hurting the readability. Be interesting once Windows 7 turns up - the new taskbar may be better suited to left/right positioning rather than across the bottom, which would make much better use of the available area.
- The CPU is a bit of a dog, but hyperthreading makes it feel a lot more responsive than an equivalent CPU from five years ago would be. It's fine for web browsing while doing a massive compile for instance, it's hardly even noticeable.
- Battery life is definitely as naff as rumoured. Minimum brightness screen and wifi on you're lucky to beat 2 hours.
- The power brick + mains cable is as big and heavy as the bloody PC is. I'm getting a shorter mains side lead for that one.
- Keyboard is cramped but after a bit of practice it's completely usable. However, there's some horrible matrix effects on it, so it's not the best for emulation (down + left and any usual fire key like ctrl or Z is not functioning, for example).
- Had a minor screen failure due to the connector for the flatpanel slipping out a very tiny little bit, which is probably my own fault after completely dismantling the thing to fit the RAM. Easily fixed with another quick trip inside.
- The glossy screen has great quality and is extremely bright up full - in this darkish room it actually hurts - but reflections are a pain in the tits. One minor criticism is that like some other Acers I've used, it prefers to be tilted a little bit further back than vertical or it washes some colours out a bit particularly pale yellows. That makes the reflection problem a bit worse too.
- Make sure you calibrate Cleartype because on the default setting it looks like arse.

Think that's all I can think of for now. For £150 it was an incredible bargain. I've probably got that much out of it already.