11.6" Netbooks Face Off

Dr. Damage writes "Netbooks have grown from tiny curiosities with 7" screens into surprisingly well-rounded little computers. The latest step is 11.6" displays with 1366x768 resolution and near-full-sized keyboards. Two such systems are available now for under $400 at US retailers: the Aspire One at Walmart and the Gateway LT3103 at Best Buy. The Gateway packs an Athlon 64 processor and Radeon graphics. The Tech Report bought them both and has compared them head to head in some depth, choosing a clear winner between the two." Like most such in-depth reviews, this one is spread across 10 pages.

Comments

netbooks, eh?

[Trepidity]

Is my 12" Powerbook with 5-hour battery life now retroactively a netbook?

Mini Acer Aspire One review

[emag]

This past weekend, the wife picked up an Acer Aspire One (AO751h) @ Costco for about $330. Came w/ 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 11.6" screen, WinXP Home w/ SP3, Atheros 802.11b/g. My impression of it, up until last night when we finally booted it w/ a USB-stick live linux distro was, in a nutshell, "worthless piece of crap that can't stay running more than a few hours".

I mean, quite literally, every few minutes, to every few hours, this new from box thing would just randomly lock hard, no keyboard, touchpad, or even power button response. Unpingable. Needed a battery pull to recover. This is with the from-factory supplied OS (WinXP Home 32-bit, w/ SP3, remember). Even sitting idle, it would do this. With or without any USB devices plugged in. Connected or disconnected from the network. With or without AV software running. With the original or updated BIOS or drivers (newest from Acer's site).

As of last night, booting off a USB-based Debian Lenny, trying to exercise as much of the machine as possible, from memtest86+ to md5summing the entire 160G drive, to just sitting idle all night long, it's _still_ running, as of about an hour ago with no lockups. Go figure. Alas, lenny's too old to have decent ath5k support (not sure that'll even really work), so I wasn't able to connect to our WPA2-protected wireless network, to see if that caused issues.

The only other caveat I've found so far, is that it uses the Intel GMA 500 graphics chipset which...isn't very well supported at all (the only Intel GMA one that isn't). Vesa resolutions are OK, but not 1366x768 native (IIRC, it's coming up 1024x768). A little too blurry/not crisp for me, but the wife seems happy enough, coming from a Thinkpad T30 that looks downright dull in comparison.

I'm not sure I'd get one for myself.

Re:More and more powerful...

[Locutus]

Microsoft wants the netbook segment gone so there's been pressure to move the spec up from where the segment started, in the $200-$300 range. It helped that Windows required more hardware than the original Linux installs did and now with Windows 7 on the way, there's a new push to boost the specs and the price.

We've already seen the manufacturers state that they were afraid of Microsoft so it'll be interesting to see who will, or can, produce the ARM based netbooks this fall. IIRC, ASUS had to spin off their ARM department of their manufacturing facility and they were also the ones to say they were sorry for showing and ARM netbook at a computer show. So far, the press is doing Micrsoft's bidding and confusing the segment by calling small notebooks netbooks.

LoB