I don't know... I wonder if the netbook thing is a fad.
I bought an eeepc. I spent a few weeks hackintoshing / writing drivers for it. That was fun, I guess. It runs sloooow as molasses though. I can see Steve's point.
Tried a few Linux distros... all were either too slow or not powerful enough. Maybe I should try Windows 7?
I don't know if I've just gotten addicted to my dual-core MBP or what. But the aggregate cost of waiting another second or so each page load makes me want to scream inside.
I happen to be recovering from the flu and I spending part of the day hanging out on the couch. Instead of dragging my 15" notebook, I grabbed my recently purchased Acer (1810TZ- same form factor but slightly more powerful than the 1410 in the article).
It's an amazing machine. 11" screen. Dual Core. 3GB RAM. 300 GB HD. 8 hrs of battery life. Pretty good build quality. And I can really do my work on it. $550 shipped.
I really can't think of what Apple is going to deliver with their tablet that at twice the price and no keyboard is going to be any better than this machine.
We have an eeePC at our house. It is one of the seashell models and only 3-4 months old. About two weeks ago, the power supply blew. Once we got a replacement power supply and were able to turn the eeePC back on, the screen had a large, wave-shaped swath of dead pixels at the bottom edge, so bad that the taskbar needed to be moved to the top, in order for Windows to still be usable. I've never had a laptop fail so hard, so soon.
My eeePC 701 from january 2008 has been dropped quite a few times (it has been used as a jukebok among bottles and glasses outdoor and fell on the floor, been used by children, and I regularly throw it away to my bed or couch when I'm done with it) and has no problem. It is rock solid, as written on the box. I actually spend more time on it than my powerful 17" laptop.
openoffice + instant messaging + firefox + media player = ~80% of my needs.
(posted from my netbook)
My EeePc 701 from Nov. 2007 has been rock solid after daily use. I'm now putting it into service as a server. I only stopped using it when someone gave me a 9" Asus for free.
Mine has spent 200,000 miles in my backpack, and it looks the same as the day it came out of the box. (Actually, I replaced the default stickers with some of my own. But you get the idea.)
Thanks for the tip on the 1810 - and hope you feel better.
I have a 17" MBP right now, and while it is one awesome machine.. it's too damn big to haul with me all the time. I'm looking for something small that I can take to meetings or to the coffee shop if I just need to do some surfing/take notes/write a few emails.
I bought a late-model eeePC recently, and one of the biggest behavior changes I've noticed is how willing I am to bring it to meetings. I can grab the thing by the bulging battery pack in the back, and because of its small size it doesn't cause any social awkwardness, as some bigger laptops do by creating a 'wall' between myself and the others in the meeting.
And because of its size, I carry it around like a small notepad. I think this is why netbooks do deserve their own category: they have a different set of use behaviors associated with them than I have ever done with regular laptops.
I must say I'm pretty amazed what my Eee PC can do.
I can have my basic Ubuntu configuration in that little beast -- it's powerful enough so that I don't have to make any trade-offs. I'll just install Ubuntu on it, remove some unused services, copy over my home directory from backups, and I'm done.
With that, I am able to surf the web pretty much like on a "real" computer but I can do that many times with a single charge and it'll last for days. I often take it with me for a weekend trip without the charger and it has more than enough juice to spend a few hours online.
Alternatively, I can fire up Emacs, Slime, JVM and Clojure and hack for five to six hours without charging. And that pretty much tops my priority list. What a little thing that is!
I'd recommend an older Linux distro or Windows XP and using Chrome as your browser (rather than Firefox). My Eee boots in about 25 seconds (15 from hibernate) and feels quite fast.
Agreed. A friend just installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Asus 1000HE and it's very nice. I'm not a power user or Linux "geek" but have to say I love it. It felt great to completely blow Win XP off the unit... it became a completely new computer all over again after having it for 8 months. Really turned it into a new experience. Very fast. Easy to use. Chrome works beautifully. The whole experience makes XP appear even more ridiculously slow (and bloated) than i'd realized.
Oh, one last thing - Chrome is incredible! What a difference it makes - super fast, quick loading, no bloat. I loaded it at work on an older Win XP Pro unit and it made IE8 look so poorly executed. I've also used Chrome on our fleet of macs at home and am impressed with its speed.
If you have an Asus, there is nothing better than eeebuntu (eeebuntu.org). It's UNR with all the hardware tweaks specific to eeepcs (all the function buttons just work for example).
A default Debian install also recognizes all the buttons. There is no need to use special software for a netbook; they are exactly the same (to the software) as any other laptop.
Haven't tried Debian, but good to know. When I tried UNR, some of the function buttons didn't work (notably the one that turned off the wireless), and two-finger scrolling was really buggy feeling. I had similar problems with Easy Peasy.
Now that you mention it, my touchpad doesn't work right. (It is stuck in "absolute mode", not "relative mode".) I rarely use the mouse, though, so this isn't something that occurred to me to check.
No need to use an old Linux distro; new ones are just as fast. Moblin gets you from GRUB to a working desktop in about 5 seconds, even when booted from a slow SD card.
My completely-non-tweaked Debian install boots in about 13 seconds. And this is with filesystem encryption that severely cripples my SSD. (The raw SSD can be read at about 100MB/s. The Atom can only un-blowfish at about 22MB/s or un-AES at 17MB/s. Ouch.)
Strange. I use my eee as my primary computer when traveling. Obviously my 8-core i7 machine at home is much faster, but this one runs exactly the same software, is super-light, and hardly ever needs to be recharged. It is the ideal traveling companion. It does everything I need it to do; I have the exact same config files on my home desktop as I do on the eee.
I am not sure how one Linux distro could be slower or less powerful than another. Same exact software, slightly different settings. (I use xmonad, which is going to feel fast on any hardware. GNOME/KDE/Win 7/OS X is going to feel slow on any hardware. It's designed to.)
I prefer to be at home with a 24" monitor and an 8-core processor with 6G of RAM, of course, but when you are stuck in the back of an airplane (which I am right now, incidentally; row 30, baby), nothing beats a netbook. When you are at your desk, nothing beats a desktop. (The laptop is truly a cumbersome device. It will never be as powerful as a desktop, but it needs a huge battery to last for more than 3 hours. And, a big screen would preclude opening it when you are stuck in economy class. Would not want.)
This is about the lowest-end desktop you can buy these days. Combined with the netbook, it's much less expensive than a 16" Macbook Pro, for example. (That's why I can't get too excited about laptops. They are underpowered, un-upgradeable, and very expensive.)
The eee runs slow because it is not built well. But there are netbooks that are built well, and one can imagine in the near future when better parts (improved SSDs, better low-power processors, etc.) make their way to netbooks that they well be even better still.
If you want to fix your eeepc and you are willing to put money into it, I'd suggest replacing the hard-drive with either a decent SSD or a decent magnetic disk.
I bought an eeepc. I spent a few weeks hackintoshing / writing drivers for it. That was fun, I guess. It runs sloooow as molasses though. I can see Steve's point.
Tried a few Linux distros... all were either too slow or not powerful enough. Maybe I should try Windows 7?
I don't know if I've just gotten addicted to my dual-core MBP or what. But the aggregate cost of waiting another second or so each page load makes me want to scream inside.