Principia Discordia

So I'm toying with the idea of getting myself a more portable computer. I have a desktop right now, and it does the job nicely, but sometimes I want to use the net when I'm not sitting in my bedroom or work cubicle.

So which of the options would serve me best?

I don't intent on doing high level gaming, but it'd be nice to be able to read a PDF or the forums and listen to music at the same time.


I'm leaning away from a smartphone, because I'd probably need to get a new carrier. (does verizon have a Droid package?)


For those of you with netbooks - do you find the lower specs prohibitive? Like is it slow, crashes often, that sort of thing? Where is the best place these days to buy a netbook or laptop?

I've got the 12" Eee PC from Asus and i like it.
It gets the job done for fucking around on the intarwebs....
its light and slim.  isn't too darned expensive....

just one datapoint

Verizon does have a few Droid type things, IIRC.  They all force your bill into $80 a month country though.  I agree they are tempting, but the small form factor and remaing gap in capability hasn't sold me on them yet.  


Laptops are great, but are almost too big, compared to the netbook portability.  I take a netbook for hours or one or two days.  It's only a corner of my bag, and give my a real computer at my fingertips.  I only take the laptop for serious long trips (Which are rarely to places I want to bring a computer anyways.), and it always requires it's own bag.  

I have an Acer I picked up for under $400, which has done a surprisingly good job. Sturdy as hell, which is good because I've dropped it a few times while it was on, including on the plug Mine doesn't require its own bag (I just stick it in my back pack with everything else when I go on debate trips and such), but its still bigger than you might like. I have Vista, so I have issues with stability, but 7 is supposed to be better and that's what's being put on laptops being sold atm so you don't need to worry and the sound quality is probably much better on new ones.

All I can really offer is that I have a laptop, and it is my main (well, only) computer. It most definitely has the performance capabilities that you listed. But, yeah, I'm not sure it's quite as portable as what you're wanting. What kind of portability are you looking for, where else do you plan on using it?

And Richter is right, I can confirm that a laptop does require its own bag if you want to carry it from point A to point B.

My work laptop is a Thinkpad.  Lenovo SL510.  I dunno how much it cost, the feds paid for it, but it seems pretty basic.  Seems to do well with the basics.  It's pretty small and light for a laptop and it fits nicely in a little bag. 

We have some ASUS deal at home.  That one is pretty nice too and it only cost me something like $500.  Tons of storage space and built in webcam, not that I have any use for that.

If it were me, I'd definitely need something with a normal keyboard.  I can't deal with little keys. 

GET... AN... iPAD....
   \
:zombie:

I like my laptop because I use it at home most of the time, but I also need to take it with sometimes. If you already have a desktop, I'd say go for a netbook.

And install Ubuntu. Either dual boot(where you choose the OS at startup), wipe windows and install it, or buy a netbook with it pre-installed.

Quote from: Cramulus on June 15, 2010, 07:36:59 PM

I don't intent on doing high level gaming, but it'd be nice to be able to read a PDF or the forums and listen to music at the same time.
...
For those of you with netbooks - do you find the lower specs prohibitive? Like is it slow, crashes often, that sort of thing? Where is the best place these days to buy a netbook or laptop?

I often have 15+ PDFs open at the same time(yes, I need them all), and I use compiz(I think that's what it's called), which gives me a cube that I can rotate, essentially 4 desktops that have a nice way to go between them, and I use this to sort all of the PDFs. At the same time I'm running OpenOffice and have a couple Chrome windows open, and there's no change in preformance. My specs aren't even all that great. I dual boot, cos I play Age of Empires from time to time.

Honestly I know very little about computers, but Ubuntu made my life so much easier just with the PDF thing alone. It uses some sort of open source software that uses barely any memory.

/prosthelytizing

The Acer Aspire One is a netbook I've owned for about a half a year, and it's pretty solid so far.  It came with windows, but that was not pleasing so I booted Ubuntu to it with a USB, and since then I've had no complaints at all. 

im sure you can find a used droid eris for around a hundred or so
new droid is about two hundred with contract or two droids (one generation back) for the same ammount.
the GPS feature might make your dreaming game more interactive with geotagging



netbooks are great as they handle flash like hulu better, tho most dont come with a cdrom

Not sure about Smartphones, but my netbook is a hell of a lot easier to carry around than my laptop.

As for performance, well mine is a first gen EeePC, and it's capabilities are nothing compared to the new ones, but it can run multiple PDFs and Firefox fine, sometimes struggles if I try to add the music player though.

eta: Oh also, my EeePC has a SSD, less space than a hard drive, but boots really quickly

Get an Iphone.

I'm planning on making an Iphone app for this place (browsing it in safari is a little tricky but doable), that way there will be more then one person using it.

Quote from: Hover Cat on June 15, 2010, 08:17:03 PM
I have an Acer I picked up for under $400, which has done a surprisingly good job. Sturdy as hell, which is good because I've dropped it a few times while it was on, including on the plug Mine doesn't require its own bag (I just stick it in my back pack with everything else when I go on debate trips and such), but its still bigger than you might like. I have Vista, so I have issues with stability, but 7 is supposed to be better and that's what's being put on laptops being sold atm so you don't need to worry and the sound quality is probably much better on new ones.

It's actually Windows 7 starter that comes on new netbooks (don't know about laptops). This is the only problem I have with my netbook, because this 7 Starter stuff is crap.

Quote from: Pēleus on June 15, 2010, 11:32:18 PM
im sure you can find a used droid eris for around a hundred or so
new droid is about two hundred with contract or two droids (one generation back) for the same ammount.
the GPS feature might make your dreaming game more interactive with geotagging



netbooks are great as they handle flash like hulu better, tho most dont come with a cdrom

DO nevar droid Eris.  Trav the Jedi has one, which the first software push sort of fucked. 

I've got a Droid and my only problem is that I think it watches me sometimes.

Other than that I'm pretty sure it can crush my enemies, drive them before me and record the lamentations of their women into text form if I download the right application.

I love my squeePC.
Yes I just called it that.
I had one of the first gen ones and killed it after a year, now I have one of the newer ones with the bigger keys and it's pretty awesome.

It runs everything I need, which isn't much but it never crashes and it fits in my purse. You can get the 9 cell battery if you don't feel like carrying around the power cords, but they're really small too.

Quote from: Cramulus on June 15, 2010, 07:36:59 PM
For those of you with netbooks - do you find the lower specs prohibitive? Like is it slow, crashes often, that sort of thing? Where is the best place these days to buy a netbook or laptop?

I never had a problem with the lower specs. After all, they're just as powerful as a desktop computer 5 years ago.

If anything, RAM is cheap and you can upgrade it from 1GB to 2GB for not much. It's a good and cheap way to give it a boost if, after owning it for a while, performance seems to start dragging.

Mine is a Medion E1212 Akoya, which is the ALDI rebrand of the MSI Wind. I have no idea how it compares to the (seemingly more popular) EEE PC, but the specs seem pretty much the same.
Only difference I can tell is that the EEE seems to have a bigger "border" while being somewhat the same size so the screen and keyboard look a littlebit smaller, but this might be a bit of an optical illusion, I never compared them side-by-side.

I bought mine for 330 euros last year in march, and I haven't had a personal desktop computer since. Didn't miss it either, except a few weeks ago when I was trying to learn OpenGL 3D graphics programming and it turned out the graphics card in the netbook didn't support OpenGL 2.0.

For some reason, the specs of the average netbook are still pretty much the same as a year ago (1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 160GB harddisk), but they got slightly cheaper.

Things to look out for that make a difference in quality are mostly the battery life. For instance, the Medion E1210 has a 3 cell battery, while the E1212 has a 6 cell. I suppose that doubles the battery life and this is totally worth it, don't skimp on that. Freshly charged, with WiFi turned off and the screen backlight turned to minimum, no USB devices, and webcam off, mine can go for 5.5 hours. It could very well be that newer models have even better battery life.

Another thing to consider is whether you get a regular harddisk or a SSD [solid-state-drive]. SSDs have less storage capacity, but they are a LOT faster (which you will notice as general system performance especially when task-switching, since Windows swaps memory to disk if it's not used immediately), and they don't have any moving parts. Which is awesome, because it means you can drop your netbook and it won't break, quickly. Similarly to how you can drop a mobile phone and it still works. A regular harddisk has a spinning disk and is very vulnerable to shocks if it's busy doing stuff.

As for the Operating System, currently I'm running WindowsXP which does its job very well. Don't get Vista, it just wasn't made with netbooks in mind. I hear that Windows7 runs again pretty well on netbooks since by then Microsoft noticed these less powerful devices are kinda popular. Of course there are several versions of Linux that you can use as well (easiest one probably being the Ubuntu Netbook edition).

The screen is just 1024x600 pixels, but with a few tricks you can use that space most optimally. I usually run all my applications maximized, except for file-explorer windows to drag-n-drop files between directories. The trick is preserving vertical space since you got least of that. So I moved the windows taskbar to the left of the screen, set it to auto-hide (which doesn't work very well in XP) and turned off its always-on-top toggle. This means you just about never see it and if you need it, you need to press WindowsKey+B to bring it to the front. I'd have preferred it if the auto-hide feature in XP worked better (then I could have done without the Win+B key, but as it is, sometimes it just doesn't hide, which sucks), but the slight hassle is worth the extra screen space. [my screen looks like this (http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/4788/netbookh.png)]

I wrote up a bunch of general tips about netbooks to Ms Freeky here:
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=24906.msg877547#msg877547

Quote from: Turdley Burgleson on June 16, 2010, 07:14:44 AM
I love my squeePC.
Yes I just called it that.
I had one of the first gen ones and killed it after a year, now I have one of the newer ones with the bigger keys and it's pretty awesome.

It runs everything I need, which isn't much but it never crashes and it fits in my purse. You can get the 9 cell battery if you don't feel like carrying around the power cords, but they're really small too.

wow they have 9 cells now? AWESOME!

Cram GET AS MUCH CELLS AS YOU CAN, DONT CELL YOURSELF SHORT

Quote from: Iptuous on June 15, 2010, 08:02:06 PM
I've got the 12" Eee PC from Asus and i like it.
It gets the job done for fucking around on the intarwebs....
its light and slim.  isn't too darned expensive....

just one datapoint

I agree with the EeePC assessment. Damn near indestructible, incredibly portable; no good for gaming, but who the fuck wants to use a screen that small for gaming anyway?

I bring it with me when I travel and use it in the office.

you guys are being INCREDIBLY HELPFUL and INSIGHTFUL

:mittens: awarded to all participants!