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What's The Perfect Balance For a Budget Laptop?
cheapbob writes "Recently HP officially unveiled a budget ultraportable laptop aimed to compete with the likes of Asus Eee PC. According to Compal, one of Dell's assemblers, Dell is also going to enter the budget ultra-portable market soon. All of these devices lack many of the features associated with larger-sized laptops, such as optical drives and large amounts of storage space, yet demand for them is very high. Initial reviews of these devices unsurprisingly expose them to be underpowered and lacklustre. What's the appeal? What do you think is the perfect balance of features and price point for a budget laptop?"
Buy a refurbished machine from Dell's outlet store :-)
Seriously, the most important thing I've always found when buying a laptop (or any machine) is not to skimp on memory. Unless you're buying a portable gaming rig, processor power isn't really that critical and your typical bundled graphics device is sufficient to handle any kind of desktop (okay, maybe not Aero...)
Came across these guys recently:
http://minipc.aopen.com/Global/spec.htm
Nice looking device. My main reservation about the Asus eee PCs is the screensize - my days of squinting at tiny screens are long gone.
Many of the laptops this post is talking about (Asus EeePC, and the entry level HP 2133) have solid state drives. No worries there.
Most modern laptop hard drives are rated to withstand specific g-forces. if you are experiencing failure and you think its vibration related (somewhat unlikely if its a recent drive/laptop) then seek a drive with a higher g-force tolerance, or replace it with an SSD.
I sell Eee PC's, and size is a big selling point. A lot of women like a laptop they can slip into their purses, and a lot of the construction guys around here like clipping it to their clipboards. Some of the college kids think it looks cool, and that helps too.
$100 and it's its own Internet infrastructure.
That is perfect.
It's also not what the OLPC project offers, at least not yet. Each laptop costs closer to US$200, and there's no Internet infrastructure included (unless you mean the mesh networking, which could be implemented on just about any 802.11 device given an appropriate driver).
And, having received my Give One, Get One laptop just yesterday, I can say that while the industrial design of the laptop is sublime, I do wish it had a little more horsepower under the hood. top can easily report a load of 0.5 or more when idling, and every application takes longer than it ought to launch.
The SHDC slot (up to 16gb of extra storage) really makes up for the small SSD. I have nLited XP running on my eee SSD and have all my programs and documents on the SD card. The only problem is stupid programs that insist on being installed to root. Those programs get run on my tower, assuming I don't decide that their reluctance makes them unworthy of being used on any system.
That's the whole point right there. 6lb is a LOT more than 2lbs. 6lbs, you might just leave your messenger bag in the car sometimes because you just don't wanna sling it
2lbs, you'd barely notice it.
I agree that one of these ultra-portable machines needs to be about on par (or even a little below) a basic desktop machine. However I disagree that it needs to run a different OS or be more PDA like. I've had a Toshiba Portege 2000 for a number of years now. This was the MacBook Air of it's day - just a little over 2 pounds/1kg, super slim, and yet powerful enough for basic tasks. (It has a 750Mhz Pentium III with 512MB of RAM.) That's pretty slow by today's standards, but with XP, an older copy of office, and firefox, it does everything I need it to do while on the road.
What I want:
Good Keyboard/Screen: When I'm typing, I want a comfortable keyboard and a decent screen. This is critical. Don't give me a stupid PDA with one of those folding keyboards. You can't type on one of those and see what you are doing. Try typing e-mail on the train or waiting in the airport when you don't have anything to set the keyboard or PDA on. Browsing the internet on anything with a screen smaller than 9 to 12 inches is an exercise in frustration - you have to scroll every which way to see anything. There's not enough content designed for small screens to be useful. The Toshiba has a 12" screen, which is about perfect. I could handle a screen that was a bit shorter, as it is easier and more natural to scroll up and down rather than right to left. The keyboard is comfortable to type on, so there's no problem there.
Good battery life: I need to go as long as possible away from a power outlet. When I'm on a plane or a train and there's no outlet available, I'd like to have a useful machine for at least 6-8 hours. Longer would be wonderful. The Toshiba falls down a bit here - the internal battery is a joke, but I've got a pair of extended batteries that get me 6 to 7 hours without having to shut down (I can hot-swap the extended batteries - that's really nice. Maybe these devices could have a small internal battery -something that might only last for 10 minutes, but it would be enough to find and swap the main battery without having to shut down. A quick suspend/restore would be okay too.
Moderate power: There needs to be enough processing power to run a web browser (and deal with all those flash animations and google apps), basic word processing, spreadsheets, a chat program, and a media player (to watch movies when I'm done working.) The Toshiba has just enough power to play divx movies (I copy a bunch to the hard drive when I go on trips - there's no optical drive and I don't need one, nor do I want one. I don't need to play 3-D games (gaming on a laptop sitting in the airport is un-fun.) So the processor and graphics don't need to be super fast. The 750Mhz Penttium III is only now getting a tad slow. It seems like you could take a 1Ghz P-III and shrink it down with today's 45nm process and have an acceptably fast cpu with low power consumption and a small size. I generally only run one or two things at a time - I don't need to have 40 applications open when I'm on the move, and so I don't need the horsepower to do that either.
Thin/Lightweight: If it is over about 2 pounds, try again. Oh, and don't forget the power supply. Make this small and lightweight too, please. The Toshiba has a little 45watt power supply that is easy to pack. It also needs to pack small. When I'm on a weekend trip, I want to travel light. I'd really prefer to be able to take just a backpack or a single carry on. On the train, I don't want a separate bag for the laptop and another for my other stuff. In fact, I really hate laptop bags. I'd rather put a little sleeve around it to protect it and through it in a bag with all my other stuff. If it needs its own bag, it stays home.
Connectivity: sd card slot (to copy pictures off my digital camera (don't need to pack the usb cable), two USB ports (for attaching an external hard drive - one for data, one for power, or for a USB mouse when I'm at home, or an external CD-burner which I use once in a while and never take with me on the road, or a