I got my Blade a couple of weeks after it came out, and I love it. 128MB of RAM isn't anywhere enough, but it's cheap to upgrade from Crucial. It's a welcome change from Linux, where it's a daily battle to get stuff compiled and working. Solaris is much better than Linux too, the directory structure is more logical, and of course, it's much more reliable.
IDE performance is poor, but extra RAM will stop it accessing the swap so much, and make the situation a lot better.
I bought it in the UK, so it was expensive, well, everything is expensive in the UK. Much more expensive than a similar speed PC/Mac, but that's not really the point is it?
Sun's monitors, like thier RAM, are v expensive, but I'm a brand junkie, so I spent the extra for a proper SUN one.
Many people will complain about the performance, but this is a RAM issue, 128MB on a SUN isn't even close to enough, consider 512MB a minimum.
Conclusion: Great machine, brings SPARC to the masses, but add $100 for more RAM. It's nice to use a quality UNIX, rather than a flaky Linux distro.
As an ex-Acorn (the machine, not the company) programmer, I'd like to point out a few things.
The performance was exceptional for it's time, when the StrongARM arrived it kicked the arse of everything else.
It's reliability was a problem when used with crap software, but otherwise excellent.
having the OS is ROM is generally a good thing, it can't be erased, however, the whole thing wasn't in ROM, just enough to get by on if you had to, the best of both worlds.
The cosmetics weren't great, but no worse than your typical Dell/Tiny/whoever piece of crap.
RISC OS (the name of the OS) was ahead of it's time, it's drag and drop is still unparralled, it makes KDE/GNOME look pretty stupid, but hey, a pen and paper makes GNOME look pretty stupid.
I no longer use Acorns, but they were great machines, they have just been left behind now.
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I got my Blade a couple of weeks after it came out, and I love it. 128MB of RAM isn't anywhere enough, but it's cheap to upgrade from Crucial. It's a welcome change from Linux, where it's a daily battle to get stuff compiled and working. Solaris is much better than Linux too, the directory structure is more logical, and of course, it's much more reliable. IDE performance is poor, but extra RAM will stop it accessing the swap so much, and make the situation a lot better. I bought it in the UK, so it was expensive, well, everything is expensive in the UK. Much more expensive than a similar speed PC/Mac, but that's not really the point is it? Sun's monitors, like thier RAM, are v expensive, but I'm a brand junkie, so I spent the extra for a proper SUN one. Many people will complain about the performance, but this is a RAM issue, 128MB on a SUN isn't even close to enough, consider 512MB a minimum. Conclusion: Great machine, brings SPARC to the masses, but add $100 for more RAM. It's nice to use a quality UNIX, rather than a flaky Linux distro.
As an ex-Acorn (the machine, not the company) programmer, I'd like to point out a few things. The performance was exceptional for it's time, when the StrongARM arrived it kicked the arse of everything else. It's reliability was a problem when used with crap software, but otherwise excellent. having the OS is ROM is generally a good thing, it can't be erased, however, the whole thing wasn't in ROM, just enough to get by on if you had to, the best of both worlds. The cosmetics weren't great, but no worse than your typical Dell/Tiny/whoever piece of crap. RISC OS (the name of the OS) was ahead of it's time, it's drag and drop is still unparralled, it makes KDE/GNOME look pretty stupid, but hey, a pen and paper makes GNOME look pretty stupid. I no longer use Acorns, but they were great machines, they have just been left behind now.