Slashdot Mirror
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 $400 at US retailers: the Aspire One at Walmart and the Gateway LT3103 at Best Buy. The Gateway packs an Athlon 64 processor and Radeon graphics. The Tech Report bought them both and has compared them head to head in some depth, choosing a clear winner between the two." Like most such in-depth reviews, this one is spread across 10 pages.
soon we'll be marvelling at the 15" netbooks with core 2 duos!!!
I can't wait!
then we'll see the introduction of some amazingly tiny 7" microbook!!
I can't wait!
I have a 7 inch netbook in my pants...
(rounded up to compensate for low self-esteem)
Like most such in-depth reviews, this one is spread across 10 pages.
I highly suggest checking out the Firefox Autopager add on. It nicely formats this into a single page for easy reading. Although I do suggest turning off the "Show AutoPager Refinements" as it will give you suggestions on search pages that try to redirect you to some other search engine. Otherwise it is EXCELLENT and fixed a lot of my hatred of viewing this 10 page articles that should be on one page.
Is my 12" Powerbook with 5-hour battery life now retroactively a netbook?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What I would like to know is which netbook is John Travolta and which is Nicholas Cage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
I have an original eee 701 and I am very happy with it. It is about right size, has large enough keyboard to type short notes and so on. The only complaint really is that it is a bit on the thick side and the use time is slightly too short. I really like the use of a solid state disk and lack of windows too, not to mention the 199 euros I paid for it as new.
I am hoping that once the current crazyness of calling ever larger things netbooks is finally over someone will make something revolutionary.. whatever they call it then... something the size of eee PC, though hopefully by then they can make it thinner. I will likely personally need such in about 4-5 years or so.. hope they have again such on the market at that point instead of the current "netbooks"
One time a scientist friend of mine talked about a pet peeve of his regarding some academic papers: when the Abstract section reads like an advertisement for the paper, rather than a summary.
I wish kdawson had the same sensibilities.
http://www.linux-netbook.com/
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I read the whole article; I thought it was worth my time. But I'll summarize the most important points for you.
He liked the Gateway better. The Athlon64 uses more power and radiates more heat compared to the Atom in the Acer; but it delivers more performance, and the author thinks it's worth it. If you want maximum run time and don't care so much about performance, the Acer would be better for you. (The Atom does hyperthreading, and some video codecs are tuned to take advantage of that, so the Acer did slightly better than expected on some video playback; but even so, he felt the Athlon64 was better overall for video playback.)
Both netbooks come pre-loaded with Vista and piles of bloatware. He scrubbed off the bloatware and updated Vista to the latest service pack, and the machines were a bit faster. He then installed Windows 7 and they were a bit faster again, but not amazingly so. He didn't say anything about Linux, but I'll wager that if he put Ubuntu 9.04 on the netbooks, they would fly.
By the way, I'm running Ubuntu on a six-month-old 10.6" Acer Aspire One, with an Atom chip, and the performance is great. My biggest complaint is that there are dialog boxes that are just too big for the vertical resolution (600 pixels); the reviewed netbooks both have 1366x768 resolution, so the dialog boxes that annoy me would not be a problem. (I'm talking about the setup dialogs for Evolution. To set up Evolution, I had to judiciously use the Tab key to move the highlight to the "Okay" button, which was not visible because the dialogs were too tall; it worked but it was a huge pain, and not everyone would know you can even do that.) I've been meaning to try the special Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu... but with these new 11" netbooks, there would be no reason to bother; just run Ubuntu 9.04.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The Gateway one "won" in the writer's estimate, due to a larger screen, faster CPU, better graphics.
Well that's effing retarded.
The entire -point- of netbooks is that they are small. The whole netbook industry seems to be grappling with its product identity, and reviewers aren't helping by routinely grading them on how close to a laptop they are.
Netbooks should be graded on size, favoring SMALL. Performance is important, but secondary to battery life. Items like durability, and comfort of the keyboard, position of the trackpad (or inclusion of a track point), operating system options, connectivity (usb/firewire/vga/dvi/etc), dvdrw internal or external, ram, flash, hard drive, etc should all factor in.
Selecting for "Largest screen and hard drive" however is demented. I can buy a Toshiba at Bestbuy for 299$ with a 15.4" screen and a 160GB hd. If I wanted a large screen I wouldn't buy a netbook. For $50 more I can make that a 300+ GB Hd.
What then? the best netbook on the market is ... not a netbook!?
When that happens something's wrong with your selection criteria.
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.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Yeah, have to agree here, once you clear a 10" screen imho, it isn't a netbook any longer. Also, if the battery life isn't at least 4hrs, it shouldn't be praised either. I got a netbook because it was small and portable, and I didn't need to be tethered to a wall after two hours of use. I did bump my ram to 2gb, and my hdd to 500gb, and in win7 with the hardware changes I went from about 5.5hrs of typical use to about 4.5... most of that is likely the change in hard drive. Still, my phone's (rooted G1) wifi tethering runs down the phone's battery in less time than my netbook lasts anyway.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info