netbooks

Ian

Ex. Club Member
Who has what? And how does it run? Not sure whether to go with something solid state or something with a larger hard drive. Opions on what you have please :)
 
I have an acer aspire one 512 ram with the 8gb flash drive. Its really good for the money, i went for the solid state one as there is less to go wrong especially with something you are likely to be chucking about.
 
Who has what? And how does it run? Not sure whether to go with something solid state or something with a larger hard drive. Opions on what you have please :)

i would never recommend solid state. most solid state drives are too small and so usually run Linix, if you don't know Linix then you have to learn it which is a pain. also there is no room for your own stuff.

they are quicker than disk drives and can't be damaged by vibration or shock, but they have a short lifetime and will only take 100,000 read/write times, after that they start to corrupt data.

disk drives are great, you just have to take care of them and not throw them about too much, but Ipods have them and some other media players and they can take the excessive movement.

diskdrives are cheap, easy to replace, high capacity with an infinate read/write time, and mean you can run windows and put common programs like office and photoshop on there
 
thats true. I have 5 or 6 spare laptop disks. All fairly large. You can still fit windows on the solid state though, i know james has it on his EEE.
 
thats true. I have 5 or 6 spare laptop disks. All fairly large. You can still fit windows on the solid state though, i know james has it on his EEE.

you can fit windows, but really it needs to be windows embedded, normal windows writes to the drive too often and it can quickly eat throught solid state drives,

there are ways to cut normal windows down so it doesn't write to the drive so often but it is very complex.
 
From looking at some articles Nex, it seems 100k write cycles was the case, back in 1997, now its close to 2m cycles.
 
I think netbooks are abit gay. They really can only be used for the net. Wouldnt fancy writing a CV on one or running a game or watching a movie (anything else a normal PC can do).

So unless you have a big massive facebook addiction dont really see the point
 
I only use mine for the net! But then thats pretty much all i do on a computer, I have a desktop anyway for other stuff. They are not gay as you put it, they are bloody useful.
 
I wouldnt run many games on it. Maybe put peggle on there or something else simple. A few TD based games.

I'll mainly use it for internet, IM'ing and callouts for VPNing into work.
 
Fair enough, the gay comment was immature :p tbh I use my phone for using the net/IM'ing when im out etc but I guess they could be useful for a heavy user

small hard drives break alot, so I'd be tempted by solid state I think
 
From looking at some articles Nex, it seems 100k write cycles was the case, back in 1997, now its close to 2m cycles.

lol sounds like i am behind the times lol

but if you think about it, have a look at the computer you are on, take a look at the hard drive light and see how many times it flashes and how much grinding noises the hard drive makes when ever you do something. every click counts as a read/write so it could get to 2mil fairly quickly, if you chucked stock windows on for example
 
you can use nlite to compact windows, windows is slow on ssd, writes and reads too much i would go for the hdd version of acer aspire
i have the 512 8gb ssd with i put xp on it via a usb and its slow, its useable though worth installing the extra 1gb ram that it can fit.
 
that 2m operations is a *full* write to the hard drive, filled with data. Calcs work out at about 51 years of activity :eek:

Anyone actually used something with an SSD drive? I know james does for sure, whats it like Jimbo?
 
The major advantage of using linux on a ssd netbook, is that you can define how often files are written to the disk. For example, you can define an amount of ram as a (volatile) storage space. Any log writes etc can then be made to ram, which is a) really really fast, and b) doesnt use the ssd. Then when you want to turn the ssd off, the ram storage is written to the ssd. Modern pc's have ample spare ram for this.

It is true that ssd's suffer from write wear. They use wear leveling algorithms that spread 'the damage'. Basically all that happens over the life of a ssd, is the available storage space gets smaller. The rate it gets smaller depends on the quality or how modern the design is. They are brilliant for storage, the jury is out on the root file system.

I had an original eepc. I sold it because the screen & keyboard where too small. The newer ones have bigger screens and keyboards. The original eepc could run 3d games like quake3 and such likes, due to good 3d chipsets. You can also run compiz fusion which is awesome (like aero in vista but less resource hungry).


If you buy a netbook, I would highly recommend getting a linux distribution on it, for all the usual reasons.

I wouldn't recommend getting a netbook unless you really need one.
 
that 2m operations is a *full* write to the hard drive, filled with data. Calcs work out at about 51 years of activity :eek:

Anyone actually used something with an SSD drive? I know james does for sure, whats it like Jimbo?

i wonder what they define as full write. the drive is usually clicking away writing info to the drive because the memory is full, this is windows page filing system. its crap lol.

but if it really is 51 years then fair enough,

i work with solid state for work, sometimes messing about with games that go into arcade machines. they run windows embedded on a 4gb compact flash card. if you put normal windows on a compact flash it dies fairly quickly. maybe its just compact flash technology that is crap.

also you would have to throttle how much tempory internet files, windows saves. the more you can save, the quicker the net, but if you save too much, 8gb will run out.

i have a laptop with a 120gb drive and it has never failed me once, i look after it and don't shake the computer too much and cut the power without shutting down, but i also have a 320gb portable laptop drive which again gets carried about and unplugged etc, and i have not had any problems with that either, and i have an 80gb ipod with the good old Toshiba perpendicular drives in them and that is fine.

so in my experiance hard disk drives are fine. i have had to replace lots of them at work but it is ALWAYS because someone has pulled the plug on the computer
 
not really a problem on a laptop.. long as the battery has charge. Long as someone posts up what their experiences is like with windows on SSD it'll give me some insight. Never used it myself yet and im quite curious.

The major advantage of using linux on a ssd netbook, is that you can define how often files are written to the disk. For example, you can define an amount of ram as a (volatile) storage space. Any log writes etc can then be made to ram, which is a) really really fast, and b) doesnt use the ssd. Then when you want to turn the ssd off, the ram storage is written to the ssd. Modern pc's have ample spare ram for this.

It is true that ssd's suffer from write wear. They use wear leveling algorithms that spread 'the damage'. Basically all that happens over the life of a ssd, is the available storage space gets smaller. The rate it gets smaller depends on the quality or how modern the design is. They are brilliant for storage, the jury is out on the root file system.

I had an original eepc. I sold it because the screen & keyboard where too small. The newer ones have bigger screens and keyboards. The original eepc could run 3d games like quake3 and such likes, due to good 3d chipsets. You can also run compiz fusion which is awesome (like aero in vista but less resource hungry).


If you buy a netbook, I would highly recommend getting a linux distribution on it, for all the usual reasons.

I wouldn't recommend getting a netbook unless you really need one.

Its main use will be for callouts with a 3G card. So i can take it places. like to a mates/family and if i get a call there's no need to get back home. It means i won't be restricted to being in the house :]. They are small and cheap, seem quite suitable to what i need it for.
 
not really a problem on a laptop.. long as the battery has charge. Long as someone posts up what their experiences is like with windows on SSD it'll give me some insight. Never used it myself yet and im quite curious.



Its main use will be for callouts with a 3G card. So i can take it places. like to a mates/family and if i get a call there's no need to get back home. It means i won't be restricted to being in the house :]. They are small and cheap, seem quite suitable to what i need it for.

exactly, well the only time i have had the laptop drives go down at work, is ones plugged into small computers in arcade machines, they switch all the machines at the plug which is what kills them, but on a laptop they have two sorces of power, and you can tell them to soft shutdown if the power in the battery gets too low, so its fine.

i have never had a personal machine running solid state but i have never had problems with HDD machines
 
i have a toshiba nb100 its ace came with 1gig of ram an 120gig hard drive an came with windows xp
iv updated it to 2 gig of ram runs alot faster now
only thing is the copy of xp you get with it wont reconise 2gig of ram if you do update the ram you have to put another copy of xp an the one you get is designed for note books thats the only stupid thing really but yeah toshiba nb100 average price of £280 to£300, never let me down
 

Aah good to see someone else using novatech! Bought my laptop from them almost a year ago, x60 i think it is, really good value for money as your not buying a name brand. Only problem ive ever had with mine was trying to play battlefield 2142 using the onboard audio card, got the blue screen of death!
Im guessing by netbook you mean a mini laptop? I was going to get one for my mum for xmas but i didnt think she would get along with the size of the screen, even though she wont do anythin technical on it. Sticking with novatech though what about this? http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/range.html?t=nb&c=home&r=M20

Main downside on this being you have no optical drives.
 
Considering they are not cheap to buy, i personally would spend a hundred or so extra for a normal size laptop instead.

I have played with a few and Acer EEE seems very well built but at the end of the day it's a toy, one that you think is nice and really want to buy but it will gather dust once you get it.
 
I had a 80gb hdd and It burnt out LOL probably my fault now I run a hdd with 500gb with seperate partitions anyways Id say hard drive as there easily replaced and laptops are more shock resistant
 
Back
Top