Re: [Hampshire] The greatest laptop ever made? (The SUN)

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007, Jack Knight wrote:

> The CPU is underpowered for Vista, and again, light for XP. Linux
> however because of its modular rather than monolithic (should I say
> megalithic) design plays well with the original design because the
> un-needed stuff can be left out. Those who want a windows based machine
> will expect it to do all the things they can do on a more powerful
> notebook or desktop machine. The worst that will happen is that the EEE
> pc's name will be tarnished as a result because "it has crap performance
> under Vista/XP" or "there's not enough memory" etc. Leave it along with
> the cut down Xandros it has, and it stands a chance.

While I don't disagree with the sentiment here my practical experience
doesn't quite match.

I find the Eee (which has a 900MHz CPU and 512MB RAM) actually feels a
little sluggish, the GUI isn't always as responsive as I'd expect and I
sometimes find I'm opening two windows because the response is slow enough
I'm not sure it worked the first time so click again when I should have
just waited a bit longer.

Compare this to my JVC laptop which admittedly was much more expensive,
but is still only a 933MHz processor with 320MB RAM, it runs XP very well
and I never have the same problems there.

I don't know whether this is an issue with the version of Xandros the Eee
runs or whether Asus have cut some hardware corners in an effort to keep
costs down and the machine actually has some bottlenecks somewhere, but
I'd be interested to play with an Eee running XP just to see how it
performed... though not interested enough to actually go to the trouble of
installing it on my machine :)

I do wonder if the article was actually written by someone who had played
with a machine or simply read about them though as personally I find the
battery life less than stellar and the "instant" on to be anything but
instant, taking about twice as long as the quoted 15 seconds to power up
from cold.

I agree though that the Eee isn't a full sized machine and shouldn't be
compared to one, the 7" screen is more limiting than I expected (bearing
in mind that I'm used to a 9" screen on the MiniNote) and there are some
other niggles that definitely mean it's not a replacement for a real
laptop, but on the whole it's a nice little machine for traveling with and
certainly good value for money IMO.

Andy