NetBook Selection

Sleepy_Steve · Sep 22, 2009

I'm pretty set on a netbook to replace my aging 5 year old laptop for school. Battery life is of critical importance to me. I've narrowed it down to two possible candidates.

Asus Eee 1005HA or the Acer Aspire AO751h

My two questions to break the stalemate:

1 - Which of these two has the better battery life?

2 - Which of them would you be happier using on a day to day basis ignoring any differences in battery life?

Hookem · Sep 23, 2009

Well I can comment on the Acer A0751h with 2gigs of ram and 250gig hard drive.

It sucks...I bought one Monday and will be returning it to Fry's today...Will not stream video without chop, chop, chopping along...Audio is the worst I have ever heard...My first transistor radio from 1961 sounded better.

Really bad piece of equipment...Chatted with Acer's online service...Their solution ??? Send it in and wait 7 to 10 working days...I dont think so.

Super slow...Vista Home Edition must be just killing it.

If you want it just to cruise the internet...Care nothing about sound quality or expect to stream video and wait like you are on dial up to open your browser then this is for you.

On a scale of 1 to 10. I would give it a 1...And that is being kind.

GrimX9 · Sep 23, 2009

I have a lot of Asus stuff and their eeePC matches their consistent quality. I have the 1000HA and I can enjoy typing and doing work on it. Good Choice.

Sleepy_Steve · Sep 23, 2009

OK, sounds good - I'll see what I can find on the Asus EEE as far as deals and pull the trigger later tonight online.

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 23, 2009

Hookem said:
Well I can comment on the Acer A0751h with 2gigs of ram and 250gig hard drive.

It sucks...I bought one Monday and will be returning it to Fry's today...Will not stream video without chop, chop, chopping along...Audio is the worst I have ever heard...My first transistor radio from 1961 sounded better.

Really bad piece of equipment...Chatted with Acer's online service...Their solution ??? Send it in and wait 7 to 10 working days...I dont think so.

Super slow...Vista Home Edition must be just killing it.

If you want it just to cruise the internet...Care nothing about sound quality or expect to stream video and wait like you are on dial up to open your browser then this is for you.

On a scale of 1 to 10. I would give it a 1...And that is being kind.

.... your problem is the fact that its a 1.33ghz atom cpu, and that its running vista those combind will cause huge problems with flash....

Sleepy_Steve · Sep 23, 2009

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220551

Will be here Saturday supposedly.
Hook ups FTW, beating even egg's price by a good bit.

Hookem · Sep 23, 2009

nd4spdbh2 said:
.... your problem is the fact that its a 1.33ghz atom cpu, and that its running vista those combind will cause huge problems with flash....

Is there a netbook that will stream video without chopping or is my best option to put XP Pro on the Acer ???

GrimX9 said:
I have a lot of Asus stuff and their eeePC matches their consistent quality. I have the 1000HA and I can enjoy typing and doing work on it. Good Choice.

Apologies to the OP...But I would like to ask if Grim's Asus will allow him to watch say the Daily Show ???

I really thought that the Acer would stream video no problem and am getting the impression that there are no notebooks available that will actually stream video without chopping along.

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 23, 2009

Hookem said:
Is there a netbook that will stream video without chopping or is my best option to put XP Pro on the Acer ???

Unfortunatly IMO at this point in time any atom based netbook is going to be marginal on flash performance. Depending on the content its going to either be just barley able to play it smoothly or dropped frames left and right.

If you are in the market for a netbook i would wait till the second generation atom comes out closer to xmas... essentially an i5 1156 type chip in super small form. (integrated memory controler, pcie controler, and onchip IGP).

This is not to say that the current atom 270 / 945GSE setup is bad at all.. i love my dell mini 9, but with something so close to release it will be beneficial to wait a 2 months or so, so you can either 1. buy the new gen atom, or 2. but the "old" atom stuff cheaper.

It really has to do with how god awful poorly adobe flash is coded / optimized (or the lack there of) when it takes more cpu usage on my main rig to play a HD flash video with a rez of something like 1024x600 than it does to play a 1920x1080 non hardware accelerated MKV file... something is wrong.

Bobnova · Sep 23, 2009

I haven't had any choppyness issues with my N270 atom, but it has a lot more power then a Z5xx 1.3ghz.

GrimX9 · Sep 23, 2009

I have no (ZERO) problems with flash. None. No lag, no choppyness, etc. I can watch youtube videos like a pro. Hulu, etc also work.

nightelph · Sep 23, 2009

^ +1 My Asus 1008HA has an N280 and has NO problems at all.

Didn't know such an advanced netbook architecture was about to come out, you're giving me buyer's remorse! Are all the netbook manufacturers adopting this?

pharoer · Sep 23, 2009

Didn't know such an advanced netbook architecture was about to come out, you're giving me buyer's remorse!

That's cause it doesn't come out...

Moorestown is perfomance wise the same as current Menlow based netbooks. It will slim down the chips needed from 3 (CPU,northbridge, southbridge) to 2 however which should help quite a bit on power consumption

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 23, 2009

your going to see the same performance jump from the q9xxx series quads to the i7 / i5's....

they are making them lower wattage which will allow higher clock speeds which is what we really need.

needless to say its worth waiting to see what will be offered up and what the performance will be like.

Hookem · Sep 24, 2009

Darn it...I was going to buy the same one Sleepy Steve was looking at.

http://www.directron.com/1005hapu1xbk.html

Let me go look at the one night elph is talking about.

Nemesis Undying · Sep 25, 2009

What about this? Uses a Nvidia GPU as opposed to intel.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...dexp/hhoslp/psg/notebooks/Mini/mini311_series

Sleepy_Steve · Sep 26, 2009

Hookem said:
Darn it...I was going to buy the same one Sleepy Steve was looking at.

http://www.directron.com/1005hapu1xbk.html

Let me go look at the one night elph is talking about.

Yeah... hmmm that is a lot more than I paid, a lot more than newegg even. I'm pretty happy with $270 shipped for it. I'd pass it on, but it was more of an "I know somebody hook up" so as long as it gets here by Monday / Tuesday, I won't have to send someone out to go break some thumbs to expedite the process.

I think the 1005HA will do what I need it to do considering its as powerful as my old laptop that its replacing, but that mini 311 looks to be pretty good as well even if it is a bit more money. I just don't think any netbook is really immune from being horribly dragged down by bloat ware. Seems very critical to me that it be kept clean regardless of what you use it for.

Nemesis Undying · Sep 26, 2009

I'm planning on getting one of the HP Mini 311 myself, mainly so I can drag my wife out of the bedroom off her pc into the front room w/ me. She loves her Myspace lol.

I looked around at a lot of diffrent netbooks and before I found the mini was eyeballing an asus eepc netbook with 2 gigs of ram, but doesn't look anywhere as promising as the nvidia solution when it comes to streaming 720p media w/ no slowdown. That mini can come with a wireless N setup and an external matching bluray, so along with everything looking good and matching (My wife wouldn't have it any other way) I'll be able to put the OS on there clean and tweak it to my liking w/o any trouble, as well as easily making a restore disk so that any gunk she downloads can be fixed easily w/o going through the hassle of trying to get a netbook up and running off a bootable usb thumbdrive.

nightelph · Sep 28, 2009

I'm reall hoping asus releases some Win7 drivers for my 1008ha. I had Starter edition on there bt couldn't get around the black screen issue. It'd really play nice with the other Win7 devices in my house.

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 28, 2009

you shouldnt have a problem with drivers n win 7.

just get the gfx drivers directly from intel as you have the same atom n280/270 and gma950 that every other netbook has.

i have had no problems with my mini 9 and win 7... i love it!

nightelph · Sep 28, 2009

I know I shouldn't have an issue, but if you check out the asus forums, people have these issues. There was also a device driver I was never able to resolve.

I just couldn't get around the black screen issue. :/ I have xp and Linux on it now, maybe I'll slice out another partition to try Win7 starter again.

NetBook Selection

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