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Where Would You Buy A Crusoe Laptop?
Misha asks: "I have been following Transmeta's news briefs for a little while and besides the stock's constant decline, there seems to be some life to the Crusoe. This story indicates that a new Crusoe-based laptop is appearing in China. Does anyone actually own one or an equivalent from some other manufacturer? Could you please post a review? Pros and cons from anyone reading would be appreciated." Unfortunately, it doesn't look like things have changed in the past year. Besides goods from specialty importers like dynamism.com (check out the Bluetooth camera!), the only Transmeta devices widely available in the U.S. seem to be the last few generations of Sony's Picturebook. I'd hoped for a tidal wave of them -- is there any hope of more widespread Crusoe laptop presence? Or are there good sources already?
The US versions of the two Crusoe portables I was looking at in my previous Slashdot post about this, the Casio Cassiopiea Fiva MPC-205E and 206E, and the NEC Versa DayLite, are both available online, direct from Casio and the NEC from CDW or PC Connection.
The Transmeta ultralight noteboooks page also has "How to Buy" links for all the listed US-market notebooks.
I watched the unveiling of Transmeta online and was holding off making a laptop purchase for a couple months after waiting to get a Crusoe...but I gave up (and the PictureBooks was not interesting in anyway). Out of sight out of mind.
So, now I'm starting to consider getting a new laptop and passing my current Toshiba 2805 to my dear wife. I have a lot of requirements -- 15" LCD, speed, harddrive, RAM, ... but I honestly could not care less about the processor manufacturer and would NOT buy a laptop just because of the processor.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Maybe you should be asking "Where can I buy a laptop with long battery life?" or "Where can I buy a laptop with really low energy consumption?". Maybe the answer won't be a Crusoe laptop.
Start Running Better Polls
My boss has owned a tiny cruesoe based laptop from NEC for around 6 months now. It runs at 600MHz supposedly (Model number is unknown but it's on the NEC website.)
The build quality is fantastic: the machine is ultra thin and light but with highly important things such as solid hinges and the like. I mean, it's just so damn sexy to look at.
Great screen. Excellent battery life. Good solid components, especially things that count like the keyboard.
I'm primarily going to bitch however. The crusoe never seems to run past 300Mhz when unplugged (iirc correctly, this is deliberate, but a serious pain: booting fairly standard win2000 install takes ages after logging in)
I have found the lack of real ethernet port highly annoying as well: basically several of the ports (eg modem and ethernet) use non-standard interfaces, which means you can't just jack in an RJ-45 connector, you have to cart around silly little "converters". This means they get either lost or broken quickly: He's on his third ethernet convertor (having lost one and broken one: if they get bent too much (eg contactly unplugging and plugging in again) then the wires come loose it seems)
The newer versions have a faster processor, and with some reading of manuals, I could probbaly figure out how to force the processor into full speed mode on batteries.
The laptop itself was bought after reading a review in the UK magazinre PC World (I think), which gave it their best rating (beating the ultralight version of the sony viao). It's used constantly every day and the fact it's so light and yet solid (aside from the damn ethernet port connectors..) means I'd look at getting one myself when I next upgrade. Nice piece of kit.