The Netbook Thread

[stealthbanana]

- Battery life is definitely as naff as rumoured. Minimum brightness screen and wifi on you're lucky to beat 2 hours.

Do yourself a favour and get a 9 cell battery, I got one from amazon for just under £50. Doubles the weight of the thing and sticks out a bit, but easily does 9 hours after a bit of tweaking with powertop which is more than enough for me.

[Dio]

I'm thinking about it but so far I've only actually used it on the battery to see how long it would last, and £50 is a third the price I paid for the thing...

[GeeZa]

The 9 cell batteries for the Acer One seem to stick out quite a lot, the standard 6 cell looks more comfy but still protrudes compared to my early-model 3 cell which is totally flush with the rest of the casing. If I planned on being mobile with this thing, I'd probably plumb for a 9 cell, charge it and sling it in a bag with the unit.

Great computers though, we use ours in our house every day.

[HGFB]

I've got a 6 cell battery in my Eee 1000h. It doesn't stick out and when I charged it earlier was reporting nearly 6 hours usage left.

[stealthbanana]

After playing about with powertop.

[oNyx]

Third (the say second) generation of netbooks:
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS9895185354.html

Asus touts the N280 in its new Eee PC 1000HE netbook as providing "better performance at only 2.5 Watts of power." Taking no chances, the company has equipped the device with a massive 8700mAh battery, which is claimed to allow "up to 9.5 hours of run time."

That fat battery actually flushes with the case. They managed to shrink the size of the board while they were at it.

[Dio]

Thing is the CPU's pretty irrelevant in these things. The chipset's awful power draw is a far bigger factor.

[oNyx]

Thing is the CPU's pretty irrelevant in these things. The chipset's awful power draw is a far bigger factor.

With the "Pineview" N280, Intel is apparently set to integrate northbridge functionality onto the CPU itself, though it has said little officially.

[Dio]

That's just the NB though, and a good chunk of the mess that is the 945 is the graphics.

[HGFB]

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/03/nvid ... w-roundup/

A handful of sites have managed to get their mitts on a miniature test PC equipped with NVIDIA's Ion platform, and it looks like the line between netbook and laptop just got a whole lot blurrier. According to the testers, the setup delivers smooth HD video playback and could be a boon for the Home Theater PC market. It won't play Crysis, but the DirectX 10-compatible chipset should do World of Warcraft and Left 4 Dead justice.

I can't wait.

[oNyx]

More here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16340

[Firefox]

Asus touts the N280 in its new Eee PC 1000HE netbook as providing "better performance at only 2.5 Watts of power." Taking no chances, the company has equipped the device with a massive 8700mAh battery, which is claimed to allow "up to 9.5 hours of run time."

That fat battery actually flushes with the case. They managed to shrink the size of the board while they were at it.

That is exactly the thing I want next from laptops: more than a whole work day's use from one charge! It's a pain in the arse when you're working somewhere away from power sockets and are struggling to get the job done before the laptop feeps and dies.

After that I want cool running and no fan (though I had a bog-standard laptop plugged into a truck yesterday and was very glad for its handwarmer-like properties! )

[oNyx]

Asus touts the N280 in its new Eee PC 1000HE netbook as providing "better performance at only 2.5 Watts of power." Taking no chances, the company has equipped the device with a massive 8700mAh battery, which is claimed to allow "up to 9.5 hours of run time."

That fat battery actually flushes with the case. They managed to shrink the size of the board while they were at it.

That is exactly the thing I want next from laptops: more than a whole work day's use from one charge! It's a pain in the arse when you're working somewhere away from power sockets and are struggling to get the job done before the laptop feeps and dies.

After that I want cool running and no fan (though I had a bog-standard laptop plugged into a truck yesterday and was very glad for its handwarmer-like properties! )

Ye, would be ace indeed. Sometimes I use my Eee to listen to some music at work (since I carry it everywhere anyways... why not?) and it's really annoying if the battery dies and I forgot the PSU at home.

I often just use it to fill out my task list on the bus and currently I gotta keep track of the percentage a bit too much for my liking. Would be ace if it would last 2 weeks with that usage pattern.

[nyarla]

Got an Eee 1000H w/ XP today. Lovely

Had a bit of trouble with the wireless card.. it worked fine all day, and then tonight, after coming out of standby, it stopped being able to recieve an IP address from DHCP.. Found lots of people with similar problems, but nothing any of them suggested helped (I tried many, many things). In the end I had to just give it a static IP. This is okay for now, as I don't regularly go anywhere where there are random wireless networks to use. Hopefully I'll figure it out eventually. Or perhaps it will work on a different network - mine is a bit crap, and quite possibly setup in a stupid way. It seems like a problem with the wireless card itself..

Apart from that, I'm in love. This thing seems only very slightly less powerful than my other computer, and is actually a lot more zippy to use. Twice the RAM and twice the hard drive space. Speakers are very loud. Resolution takes a bit of getting used to..but until a year ago my only PC was 1024x768 max, so it's alright Battery life and carryaroundability - just awesome. Obviously.

I don't really do any PC gaming or video watching.. the most intensive thing I do is multitrack audio work.. only done a quick test with my DAW sw so far, and was surprised to see it played back a couple 10-12 track sessions with a few plugins and midi instruments perfectly. Rock!

[Dio]

I've had trouble like that with multiple machines in the past. Generally it's a slight incompatibility between the wireless card's drivers and the AP. It'll probably work fine on a different AP. One of the main reasons I regard wifi as a horrible, hard-work mess though.