Macbook? Nah, Netbook's where it's at!

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reddeathdrinker

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Took myself up to PC World this evening, after much research, and bought myself a Netbook! For those of you asking "What's a Netbook?" - It's a very small, lightweight laptop. 8"-10" screen, Intel Atom processor, and a variety of solid-state or regular hard drives. Prices from £199 upwards...

I went for the Advent 4211 (a rebadged MSI Wind), and I'm very pleased with it so far...

Will post updates!!
 
I notice that it's too small for a disk drive, but looking at the pictures on the link, is there a compactflash slot? And, if there is, is it rewritable?
 
smithphoto said:
I notice that it's too small for a disk drive, but looking at the pictures on the link, is there a compactflash slot? And, if there is, is it rewritable?
Click to expand...

There's no optical drive, you get 3 USB ports and a SD card reader... It's just so compact, it has to be seen to be believed!
 
I just swapped by 4211 for a 4213. Its slightly heavier but has inbuilt 3G. I plan to upgrade the disc to solid state when the prices some down a touch and then I have a PC I'm willing to pack in checked luggage!

Makes the Jobo and Epson card downloaders look expensive all of a sudden!
 
Slapo said:
Did you get one with a SSD?
Click to expand...

No, I got a real hard drive - Comes with an 80GB as standard, but it's easily upgradable anywhere up to 320GB. I timed the display models booting up, and the SSD version was only 2 seconds faster...

The original EEE PCs had pretty naff processors, but these Intel Atom versions pack a mighty punch for their size:)
 
reddeathdrinker said:
No, I got a real hard drive - Comes with an 80GB as standard, but it's easily upgradable anywhere up to 320GB. I timed the display models booting up, and the SSD version was only 2 seconds faster...

The original EEE PCs had pretty naff processors, but these Intel Atom versions pack a mighty punch for their size:)
Click to expand...

It must have been one of those cheap SSDs, the better ones are blazing fast.

Where I've seen Atom benchmarks, it was slower in everything than the slowest Celerons available.

Is the real life performance acceptable?
 
I have an eee pc 1000 thingy with the 1.6 atom. I use it for email abroad as adds little weight in hand luggage with camera and ideal for downloading pictures to for a quick look. I tested it with adobe illustrator CS and canon's DPP and it works with relatively little fuss. Windows xp is quicker to load than my desktop although much less crap on it. Yet to try with photoshop or lightroom but as it's pointless to do much editing on these laptops there's not a lot of point loading them on.
 
I have had a Advent 4211 since they first came out (early July). I now have a 500gig HDD, 2gigs of ram, and 802.11N wireless modual in it. I also have it running OsX 10.5.4 leopard. It runns everything quite ok, but is not as fast as I would like (keep in mind I also have a Asus EEE PC 701, Macbook Pro, and tower workstation).

With windows XP installed, it is not that useful for me, but with the mac OS installed, it is more useful as a notebook, as the wake up and sleep times are almost instant, and I can always have it in sleep mode, and keep all the programs running, so I can do something with it real quick and then turn it off.

Also since the wifi card is a PCI-E mini card, you can replace it with one that does 3g/HSDPA very easily. OsX detects an external screen quite nicely and overall is better then XP on a small device like this.
 
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