Netbooks pros cons and 7

Skitals said:

What linux distros are you talking about? Non of the distros I've tested are remarkably faster booting than XP.

I was thinking of something along the lines of DSL or Puppy...or one of the varients. I don't have anything in particular since I don't own a netbook of my own...and my work place wouldn't be too happy if I removed XP from ours and put something else on there.

Skitals said:

And like I said, battery life is always better in XP. If you look at the specs on Eee PCs available with both Linux and Windows, the stated battery life is significantly greater on the windows version despite the computers having identical specs/batteries. The power management just isn't as good with the linux kernel.

Hmmm...I was approaching this from the standpoint that a very light-weight OS wouldn't need all that much hardware...so scale the hardware back signicantly on a tiny OS and you get longer battery life. But like you said, maybe the ideal distro doesn't exist yet...or isn't friendly enough for the people to embrace.

7echno7im said:

Hey Skitals, just to follow up on your post, there is an Ubuntu netbook Edition now. I haven't tested it yet but thought I would mention it.

Download Ubuntu Netbook Remix | Ubuntu

Yup the netbook remix branch has been around for ages, and there are a lot of distros based off it (easy peasy and jolicloud are two I have used). Jolicloud is promising, but I was having trouble installing from SD card (they only provide a flash image, I didn't have the patience to try making a bootable cd).

I cant wait to see what google comes up with with Chrome OS.

Hmm. Interesting. Contrary to the post above, I find that on average, I get better battery life with Windows 7 than I do XP on my Acer Aspire One.

Skitals said:

I'm typing from win7 7600 on my 900HA... zero problems. There are instructions on eeeuser to get the acpi drivers and such installed and the hotkeys working. Everything works great!

My 1000HE is working great also. Instructions not needed for newer models, ASUS XP drivers readily install.

Skitals said:

I'm totally with you on screen size... 9" is perfect. Anything bigger and you are missing that crucial portability, which are really all that netbooks have going for them. You would think think with the bigger screens they would up the res. 1024x600 on even a 9" screen in unacceptable, imo.

The 9" screens waste about an inch around the border so 10" makes better use of the available lid area without increasing the size of the unit. Giving it higher res, better graphics, faster CPU, etc. would be nice but you lose battery life or you'll need a bigger one which would increase it's bulk. These things were designed to be efficient as well as small.

Skitals said:

That's my main complaint about 7 on my eee... I love the taskbar but it takes up more screen real estate. Right now I have the taskbar set to auto-hide, which I don't prefer.

By default, 7's taskbar is bigger. Change it's properties to use small icons and it will shrink. XP windows seem to have larger borders than 7's and looks ugly too. SSD support in W7 is another plus for netbooks.

bum said:

The 9" screens waste about an inch around the border so 10" makes better use of the available lid area without increasing the size of the unit.

The 10" models have the same size border around the screen. The 10" models are MUCH bigger. Have you never seen the two side by side?

900HA: 8.86" x 6.69" x 0.79-1.33"
1000HE: 10.47" x 7.53" x 1.12-1.50"

That means the 900 series is approx. 78 cubic inches in volume. The 1000 series is 118 cubic inches. That is a 50% increase in its size!

The 900HA weighs 2.49lbs. The 1000HE weighs 3.2lbs. The 1000 series is 28% heavier.

They are not the same size. They are not even close in size. If you want to see what a 9" screen looks like in the 1000 series body, look at the 904HA. Now THERE is a big border around the screen

I hope this thread does not turn into a netbook bashing thread! I have the Samsung N110 which is the replacement to to the NC10. It is by far the best tech purchase I have made in years!!. I am running Windows 7 and it runs very very well, not just ok but very well! I've got 2gb of ram which makes a difference I've also replaced the wifi and now have OSX86 running perfectly in dual boot. I bought this for the portability but it also has a 93% full size keyboard and is comfortable to type on for hours at a time. Battery life is arounf 7 Hours (get that from a laptop, I dont think so). I can also play video really well including HD. I have Unreal Tournament 2004 running on it with 35fps! all on a crappy intel 950 GMA. One funny thing about my laptop vs my netbook is that I cannot actually have my laptop on my lap! too heavy and too hot! lol Samsung is soon to launch a new model with dual core atom and an nvidia ion gfx chipset. Just to recap huge battery life, great keyboard and most of the function of a bigger laptop.
cheers settingsun

Skitals said:

The 10" models have the same size border around the screen. The 10" models are MUCH bigger. Have you never seen the two side by side?

900HA: 8.86" x 6.69" x 0.79-1.33"
1000HE: 10.47" x 7.53" x 1.12-1.50"

I wasn't making any comparisons. Maybe I didn't word it properly. I should've wrote: The 900 series screens waste about an inch around the border so a 10" display in them would've made better use of the available lid area without increasing the size of the unit.

They all can accomodate bigger screens than what they come with, including the smallest 9". For the 1000HE and later models, it's the larger keyboard that dictates its size and it too, should logically have a larger display. A netbook's keyboard and display width should be the same to make the best use of what's inherently available.

schmoey said:

Hmm. Interesting. Contrary to the post above, I find that on average, I get better battery life with Windows 7 than I do XP on my Acer Aspire One.

With my NC10 I get around 6 hours on XP and 4.5 hours on W7.