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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?"
Those smallish ones are fine, but not paying what they are asking when you can get a full size normal budget laptop for the same scratch $400-500. $100-200 tops right now would be my budget.
Anyway, that's my price point for getting a toy-ish low featured laptop, although they are featured-enough, solid state drive is fine, lowerpowered CPU is fine, just not be skimpy with the RAM, at least a gig or two.. The original OLPC hundred buck idea would be nice then.
So, you richer guys, get crackin and buy a zillion of them for what they are asking now, so the price can drop some more..heh.
I think you're asking the wrong question. Budget, Ultra-portable, Powerful - you can have any 2 out of 3.
If the question is truly about Budget and "powerful enough", obviously the thing won't be ultraportable. You can get a reasonable machine (~5 lbs, 14" screen, low-end Core Duo or Turion based) for about $500, or even lower if you look for sales or rebates.
You can then add a cheap or free office suite (e.g. OpenOffice), Firefox, etc., and you're ready to go.
They are basic, note-taking, doc-writing, email-sending, web-surfing, e-book-reading, port-able, wire-less, hand-held AKA lap-top devices that don't cost much. Perfect for the coffee table to look up imdb ratings in front of the TV or to check the weather radar/forecast before heading out in the morning.
Couldn't fit-in any more hyphens.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I've got an Eee with Windows XP installed on it and it runs just fine, even at the stock 630Mhz. Overclocked up to 850Mhz, which mine is perfectly stable at, it's genuinely snappy.
XP isn't too much of a resource hog even with all the chrome on, and you can turn most of it off if it does impact performance.
It's really no different than the Duron 800Mhzish I had back in the early 2000s. The only downside is the small screen, but the 2nd generation fixes that this year with a full-sized 9" 1000x600 screen.
The Asus EEE in book has a Killer Combination of features I've last seen about 13 years ago with the Highscreen "DOS 5.0 / Works 5.0 on ROM" Pocket PC (which basically was a cheap rebranding of an earlyer expensive Sharp Pocket PC). These features are:
+ Small.
+ Durable.
+ Full PC - runs all PC stuff I need.
+ Sacrafices Optical for durability, size and price == good move - I don't want to watch DVDs on a small thing like that anyway. I *do* however, want to use OpenOffice in a pinch.
+ No extra custom gadget connectivity stuff needed. Supports all standard ports out of the box. Means: Ready for universal flexible use. Cheap.
+ No obscure custom purpose 'Pocket OS'. Linux beats Palm OS any time of the day.
+ Linux preinstalled, Debian Variant being a big bonus. I'm a programmer and an IT pro. I want to use a Computer, not a pimped out virii-ridden slowpocking typewriter that needs DirectX to render it's desktop.
Now only if I could get one. These things are hard to come by right now.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The biggest problem in portable systems that aren't designed to replace a desktop is that they couldn't replace one if they -had- to. And honestly, when I've carried a laptop around with me for any length of time and serious usage, it's gone and replaced my primary desktop for everything except gaming. For people like your typical Slashdot reader, unless we get something that's at least on par with a low-end but functional desktop, we're probably going to be too frustrated by a limited budget laptop.
I have a Macbook, and I love it. But if I wanted something on a budget that was going to be my utility system for lugging around and doing office-type tasks, the last thing I'd want to use is a full-blown desktop OS. There really needs to be a new kind of system designed for portable machines that's designed for ease of use, low power consumption, and high grades of flexibility without needing to wade through a typical desktop interface.
If I were designing a new OS for one of these systems, I'd want something that handled software installation and deletion similarly to OS X. You drag a file into Applications or wherever, and it runs when you click it. I would want accessory and connectivity options designed along the lines of a
PDA - illustrative graphical things you toggle on and off with virtual switches. I'd want a heavily customized and graphically streamlined version of Open Office to handle documents. A modified version of Firefox made to work within the context of a special application control bar similar to a combination of the OS X task bar and the Windows tray.
Linux is just not a good platform for something like this as it currently stands. I for one never want to worry about whether or not my glibc is the right fucking version before I install software. (It's been a while since I used a mainstream distro for longer than a few days) And I know that if I don't want to know it, my mom sure the hell wouldn't when she saw a neat new gadget to install on her email device.
Insofar as hardware goes, I think Intel has the right processor coming out with Atom. If a system like I just described was written from the ground up, a gigabyte of RAM should be plenty - but go for two so you can use one as a disk cache for even more speed improvement. Again, a custom OS and streamlined applications could be easily done within a few gigabytes of hard drive. And there's no reason an 8G internal flash source wouldn't work with an option to slot in another 8 or so with the latest flash technologies for media storage and application space.
Dual-core CPU's wouldn't necessarily be needed if you're not loading up a monster desktop OS. Just take a look at what Nokia has managed with the N8XX line, which for all its faults is still a damn nice little piece of hardware. It runs Linux, so packaging is a clusterfuck, and at least the N770 takes a while to boot - then runs slowly - but those can be overcome with RAM upgrades.
I rant too much.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
About a year ago I needed a lappie and was low on cash. I found an Acer 3680 "Best Buy special" for $400. This is a standard 15.4" screen-size laptop BUT they put a 14.1" in to save a bit of money. It's still 1280x800 and very readable. Other specs:
* About 6lbs.
* Celeron 1.6 single-core with a 533 memory bus.
* 512megs RAM, 80gig SATA, DVD-read, CD-R/RW.
* Intel 945 video.
* PCMCIA slot.
* Atheros WiFi.
This is about the same horsepower as the recent crop of "ultra-lights", with more disk space of course.
I dropped an extra gig in it for cheap and nuked Vista Home Basic immediately for Ubuntu. I'm typing this on it now, with Ubuntu Gutsy. I have full Compiz support although the limited graphics speed seems to limit the "cube" to a two-sided plane (two desktops) with full speed. I also have VirtualBox and Windows XP running perfectly.
I even run whole-disk encryption with TrueCrypt with no noticeable speed penalty.
It's been dropped twice and survived a water-glass spill that nuked the WiFi card but that was a $20 fix. It's been carried *daily*, used hard and runs like a champ still.
This low-budget critter is enough to make anybody re-think the need for anything more potent, if you're running Linux.
I mention all this to establish what performance baseline is really needed today.
I wouldn't trade this critter for anything physically smaller, but then again I'm a big guy and am not bothered by running a sizeable "messenger bag" style laptop case.
Finally, thumbs up to Acer for offering a cheap, tough and useful as hell little critter.
Thumbs down to Micro$loth for fostering a crapware OS on them...
I can't fathom why someone would travel 2 hours each way, every day, just to get to the place where you work. Maybe it's cheaper, but aren't the minutes of your life worth more than saving a few bucks? Even if you worked in NY you could find a reasonable (relative to the payscale and market) place to live that's 30 minutes away.
Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, yes you can find a reasonable place to live in town on a middle class paycheck. If you don't mind renting forever (median apartment prices are over $900k) and you don't have kids. As soon as you actually care about the schools and neighborhood cultural ideals, acceptable places to live become amazingly scarce. Most of the towns around NYC where the soccer mom lifestyle exists also are priced that $200k a year salary is the entry level. The median housing prices are around $600K and property taxes are high. So anyone who makes less than the requisite $200K lives farther away, and your don't have to get all that far away for a rush hour commute to take two hours or more. Minutes of your life may be worth more than a few bucks, but your family's standard of living is worth more than a few minutes. This is where the jobs are, so millions of people make the daily trek.
We are all just people.
I thought they came darned close with the EEE. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it had an actual hard drive. My only complaint was the lack of storage.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
"As gigahertz race is over and mobility takes over, size, power and price are becoming more important than performance"
Don't forget the silence and no-maintenance aspect that going completely passively cooled and solid-state affords you. And even in a desktop system all the other issues apart from computing speed become important once you experience the difference.
Such other concerns are the whole raison d'etre of silentpcreview.com. There have been some clever cases designed for silence, but they lack the elegence of a small enclosed box that never needs to have filters cleaned or the worry that a fan will seize at an inopportune time.
With the release of the Intel Atom and the Via Isaiah I suspect that it will be only a matter of time before we get the desktop system with essentially no downside. Which is why I'm waiting for it, because at that point the upgrade cycle will likely be over for me. Maybe there will be a killer app coming along, but we are 4 cores into the parallelization path of more CPU horsepower and I haven't seen it yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Isaiah
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.