The Netbook Thread

[WiteWulf]

It started populating my front page with Last.fm and twitter messages as soon as I'd put my details in and the whole thing just looks lovely.

[tufty]

I've just inherited a netbook. Well, parts of one, at least.

It's a Toshiba nb100, 1G / 120G, with a non-functional Windows install on it. It also has no screen, no keyboard, no wifi antennae, no camera, only 2 of the 3 USB ports work, and the motherboard is cracked / smashed around the ethernet port attachment / 3rd USB port. And the case is fucked. It's had a "ballistic trajectory" experience.

Still, with an external monitor and keyboard, it boots as far as the BIOS quite happily, and I can happily live without windows on it - the plan is to install something fast and lightweight, and use it at as the guts of a dedicated stargate emulation machine.

So, recommend-me-do, oh yakkers. What should that "something" OS be?

I have ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix burning to a usb thumb drive as we speak, but I might be convinced to use something else (like freeDOS, maybe) if I can convince it to work with a hacked-to-fuck USB controller.

[zip accident]

Oh yes!

http://www.shanzai.com/index.php?option ... s&Itemid=5

we tested it with World of Warcraft 3D in the default configuration, FPS was between 20-30, it was very smooth and the display looked good.

Probably not exactly what I want, but I think the avalanche has begun.

[Bubba]

Wow, WoW at 20fps. Colour me thoroughly unconvinced I can't imagine many games working well on a 9400, at least many modern (last 3 years) games. Anything with vaguely modern shaders is not going to play nicely on that, even at a lower resolution...

Cheers

Bubba

[zip accident]

Wow, WoW at 20fps. Colour me thoroughly unconvinced I can't imagine many games working well on a 9400, at least many modern (last 3 years) games. Anything with vaguely modern shaders is not going to play nicely on that, even at a lower resolution...

Cheers

Bubba

Message recieved and understood. What you say is true.

Ion is barely borderline gameable, but look at the bottom of this chipset chart:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bes ... 387-7.html

All the current Intel chipsets are below the gf 9400 (I also find it tricky to remember which of the Ati chipsets aren't, but that's my memory playing up again).

Look at these Dell netbooks, all Intel graphics chipsets:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/home/mi ... 7440120564

Notebooks:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/home/la ... &cs=ukdhs1

£479 before you get past the Intel graphics, and is a Radeon HD 4570 significantly better than a GF 9400?

Or these "gaming" notebooks:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/home/xp ... &cs=ukdhs1

£649 for a gf 8400 gs, I don't think that's better than a gf 9400 (though it could be that nVidia have really messed up their naming, and a 8400 is better than a 9400).

I'm not saying Ion is great, I do think it stands a chance of being a real kick up the %^&* to some of the rubbish at the bottom end of the portable graphics market.

[RiK]

Finally picked up a mini9 courtesy of the Gazlord last weekend and now have a fully functioning ultra-mini Mac.

It's aces. For now I've just stuck 2gb of ram in it and installed Leopard on the stock 16Gb SSD (which leaves about 7Gb free). installation was pretty painless apart from one silly RTFM on my part when I misread thhe bit that said DONT restart yet. I used a USB dvd drive but it's easily done from a USB memstick too.

My intention is to see how I get on and then if I find it usable I reckon I'll get one of those 32gb runcore SSDs which are a lot quicker, and a dead easy install as they has a usb port so you can just do a normal install to it as an external drive on a mac and then just run the DellEFI app to tweak the startup stuff. Actually, it'll be even easier now as I can just clone this one on to that via Carbon Copy Cloner.

Everything works, wifi, BT, web cam, card reader etc all worked instantly which was awesome. Needs one little bios tweak to get sleep working but thats nowt.
Yeah the vertical screen limit is a bit frustrating for serious stuff but thanks to the crazy internet people I've just managed to get 2 finger scrolling working on the trackpad just like a real macbook and that makes life *much* nicer.

The biggest complaint most people have with the Dell is the tiny keyboard but thankfully I only have little girly hands and so I'm finding it ok for a bit of general sofa surfing, Saying that i used to get on fine with a Psion series 5 and this reminds me a lot of that.

[RiK]

Just got 3 finger fwd/back working too

[Bubba]

That ATI card you mentioned is significantly more powerful than the 9400. My main problem with this is that people expect modern games to run on these things, which they won't They certainly won't run on the integrated intel shite. They probably won't run on the 9400. They'll probably run on the mobile radeon card that you mentioned. I don't see the Ion having that much of an advantage over the intel chip I'm afraid - both are sufficient for web surfing with a 3d accelerated desktop windowing system like Aero or Quartz. Neither are really going to be viable platforms for modern gaming, and as such aren't going to get any attention.

I've got a laptop with a Geforce 8600GT M in it, which is powerful enough to play the odd game. But for the netbook market I can't help but think the Ion is a giant waste of time...

Cheers

Bubba

[Bubba]

Are you running the latest software updates RiK? I've held back installing the latest 10.5.8 because I've filled my 16gb ssd! Been quite tempted by a runcore 32gb one though, let me know how you get on if you do go that route

Oh, and did you patch bluetooth so you could turn it off? My mini didn't come with bluetooth so I bought an internal one from ebay and connected it up, but had to do some limited hackery to gain the ability to turn off bluetooth!

Cheers

Bubba

[zip accident]

That ATI card you mentioned is significantly more powerful than the 9400. My main problem with this is that people expect modern games to run on these things, which they won't

It depends what you mean by modern. I've played Oblivion on a Radeon 9550, which is less powerful than a gf 9400, and on an x1550, which is about the same I think. The x1550 wasn't really good enough, because there were other options, but the 9550 was tolerable in the short term, because (to the best of my knowledge at the time), there weren't.

But for the netbook market I can't help but think the Ion is a giant waste of time...

Cheers

Bubba

The way I see it it is that there's a choice between Ion, which is at the low end of the acceptability scale for gaming graphics, and the current Intel solutions, which so far as I can tell, generally aren't anywhere near that good for gaming. I'd say that from the one journalistic comment I've read (I forget where), it sounds as if Pinetrail is also significantly lower in performance than Ion.

It depends what you want a netbook/laptop for. I hear some people want netbooks as backups to a full laptop. I want a primary computer to use when I'm away from my desktop, mainly for games. As it's secondary, resolution can suffer for FPS, I'm not expecting huge resolutions to be playable, which is one reason for liking smaller screens, since they'll be less compute intensive.

[zip accident]

I think Ion could be important for netbooks and laptops, if it takes off in netbooks.

There are several reasons it might not take off:

1/ Intel want to keep selling their weaker graphics solutions, and have a lot of money they can throw at making making Ion fail, particularly by "giving discounts" on processors sold with their own chipsets, such that processors sold without chipsets are more expensive than those with chipsets.

2/ nVidia are not in the strongest financial situation possible, in part due to their previous failing laptop GPUs.

3/ Microsoft are in the process of launching Windows7, which will be very important for Microsoft. There have been delayed launches of Ion products to wait for the arrival of Windows7. Microsoft will want the most expensive possible version of Windows on any new products, in Ion's case that may be a more expensive version of Windows7 than the versions that can be sold on graphically challenged Intel chipsets, if that idea is applied it will put up the cost of Ion machines, irrespective of the actual cost of Ion, and extra to the increased costs due to Intel's shenaigans.

4/ Naysaying. There's a lot of it about, and I don't really understand why. Ion is tech (which is generally seen as a good thing), it will be an option you can chose if you want it, or avoid if you don't, it is better than the current options in it's particular marketplace.

I am not particularly committed to Ion, if some other company came out with something better, cheaper and consuming less power, I'd be behind that in a flash. At the moment it seems to me that Ion offers the best performance for cost, and there doesn't seem to be any sign of anything similar.

[RiK]

Are you running the latest software updates RiK? I've held back installing the latest 10.5.8 because I've filled my 16gb ssd! Been quite tempted by a runcore 32gb one though, let me know how you get on if you do go that route

Yep, on 10.5.8 here, still waiting for the crazy internet people to get Snow Leopard working

Oh, and did you patch bluetooth so you could turn it off? My mini didn't come with bluetooth so I bought an internal one from ebay and connected it up, but had to do some limited hackery to gain the ability to turn off bluetooth!

Err, no. To be honest I didn't even think about it until you mentioned it. It seems to be on all the time unless I disable it in the bios. Must check that out as I don't really need it.

[Bubba]

There's a thread over on mydellmini which covers enabling turning on and off bluetooth. I think it was this one which I followed.

Cheers

Bubba

[Portland]

Assuming we pick up an Acer Aspire one 150L (Linux build) are we likely to have any issues transferring pictures to it from cameras (Olympus camers, data on XD cards) or would we be safer going for an XP build?

[wanye]

my old eee701 (linux) had no issues getting data from my cameras, although i never plugged them in directly, i always used a usb card reader to get the files off. so at the very least you'll be able to use this method on the aspire one...