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"Netbooks" Move Up In Notebook Rankings
Ian Lamont writes "For the first time, a list of popular notebook reviews shows three 'netbooks' in the top 10. The netbooks use Intel's Atom processor. Notebookreview.com's editor says there has never been more than one netbook in its monthly ratings. The reason for the netbooks' sudden popularity no doubt relates to the price and basic functionality, but there's a catch. Despite calling Atom a 'high-performance' chip, Intel cautions people not to confuse netbooks with notebooks, as netbooks will be unable to take on video editing or other processor-intensive tasks. This leads to the question of how netbooks will be able to handle demanding Web apps — or whether Web apps will have to be slimmed down to accommodate millions of netbook owners."
Vaginas are tasty.
Hairy ones, however, are gross.
The listed top 10 are hardly all "netbooks". Acer Aspire One is the best of the bunch IMO; and the fact that you can customize (even Mac OS X ?) to your heart's content, gets added brownie points. Most popular Linux OS can be easily installed on the aspire one if Linpus doesn't cut it for you. Here is a list of "hacks" (whatever you wanna call it) http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2008/09/27/30-cool-acer-aspire-one-hacks/
FWIW, the rankings are based on click counts to the reviews of laptops on the site mentioned in the OP. It has nothing to do with actual sales.
But, one not everyone knows that it exists and should be the player of choice. Two, VLC does not always work well with flash media. It will play, but it sometimes crashes when using the foward/backwards. And, of course, it does not work with DRM media of the kind of content delivered by the likes of Amazon, which often are the exact media that imposes the overhead that kills many machines.
F11
;-)
I also highly recommend the Tiny Menu extension for FF.
> My main worry about these netbooks is video decoding
Video decoding is fairly easy... it's ENCODING that really sucks down the CPU cycles. Old computers didn't have problems decoding video in realtime because they were too slow... they choked because they didn't have enough RAM to keep everything related to the video buffered in physical RAM, and keep it there while doing other background tasks. The moment you start getting page faults and swapping things out to hard drive, all bets are off... even with a dual-core CPU.
I just bought a MSI Wind a few days ago (with second SoDIMM for 2 gigs total). It's surprisingly fast, even for things like Netbeans and Visual Studio. The key? Lots and lots of RAM. Avoid swapping, and everything else falls into place... even with a "slow" CPU. A Vista/XP/Linux-with-Compiz notebook with 2 gigs, 5400RPM hard drive, and a 500MHz Pentium III will probably provide better real-world performance than a "modern" budget notebook with 512mb, ~2GHz Celeron M, and 4200RPM hard drive because the "faster" new one will run out of RAM almost immediately and be shackled to its slow hard drive, while the "slower" old one will chug along nicely because it doesn't have to keep violently lurching back and forth as it swaps things between physical ram and the hard drive.
I am a web developer and also own a EEE PC. Websites with fixed height are declining. People are designing with the idea of "above the fold" and don't really care about the vertical scrolling.
Moreover, with my EEE PC I browse in full screen mode (F11), have a plugin to replace the menu-bar with a button next to the address bar, and also have a tiny-button theme which is even smaller than the default firefox "small buttons" option. I don't really care enough to do an actual comparison, but I think it's pretty damn close to a regular 1024 x 768 with menu bar + big buttons + windows taskbar.
Asus eeepc1000. I'm using the one with the hard drive. It's a solidly built machine with a 10" screen and a battery life which is about double that of the nearest competitor. They're going for $460 on some order sites.
If you can live with a slightly smaller screen and if battery life isn't terribly important, then the Aspire One looks like a pretty great deal with a lot of happy users and an 8Gb SSD.
I find writing on the eee1000H really easy. Nice, big keyboard, and a decent screen size. If the machine were any bigger and it wouldn't be comfortable or easy to use, any smaller, it would feel limiting. (I've owned a couple of other small machines over the years, and I find a good screen size is vital for comfort in writing; I don't know how it is for coding, but I find I need to see more than just the immediate line of text I'm working on to write effectively. SSD seems like a good idea, but the laptop hard drive in the Asus works just fine. A friend of mine dropped one while it was playing a video and it didn't skip a beat. --Though I don't know if that would be such a good idea if it was trying to write at the time, but then I don't drop my hardware.
-FL
Intel keeps saying that it's Atom processors aren't heavy duty, but I think that's marketing spin to avoid taking the bottom out of the market for the more profit-laden processors.
I recently compared the Eee PC to my laptop. The Eee PC was able to calculate prime numbers at about 90% of the rate of my existing three-year old laptop. So, on a processor-to-processor comparison, they are about even. But the Eee PC also has three years of better hard drive, bus, and memory technology, and I expect it to fully whoop my laptop there.
Basically, I view these netbooks as having the same power as a 2-3 year old average laptop, but in a smaller form factor.
Use a presenter and don't look at your computer's screen at all! When I give presentations I use a computer pointing and laser pointer device (presenter) which allows me to control my computer while looking at the audience or the wall. I can move the mouse pointer, go down or up a page, etc. In fact I have four such presenters.