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Netbook (notbook) Shopping

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blueswitch

blueswitch

Member
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Joined
Jan 25, 2005
Location
Denver, CO
I'm netbook shopping and I wanted the forums 2cents. Kind of frustrating since the manufactures websites are designed horribly for narrowing down your search (looking at you Asus).

Anyway I'm going overseas for a handful of months (backpacking) and this will be the primary computer, so size,weight and build quality is an issue and it can't be frustratingly slow to use.

Zacate seems like a great platform right now, although there doesn't seems to be a lot of computers using it right now and Ion 2 might be just as good? As long as it isn't painfully slow to use and a little old gaming would be great (think Dawn of War 40k, not MW2) as long as it has pretty good battery...it doesn't need to last 12hours because then I know it won't be able to even run Hulu...but it's gotta be more than 2hours.

What would you guy's buy before the end of summer?
 
I'd go with an Asus 1015pn. and swap the hard drive to a good SSD and get some low latency ram. I went with the 1015pem, and did the hardware upgrade and the system performs great. The only thing holding me back is the graphics. The 1015pn has an Nvidia ion graphics chip which would help. The whole setup is a little heavy, but downgrade the battery and you should be fine.
 
They main thing is your price point? For $200 you can find a good 6 cell atom setup, for a little more you get better features, or move to an ion or bobcat based system.
 
With an Ion 2 system does that dynamically kick in? Or do you have to reboot to switch GPU's? I know with Ion 1 you had to reboot. The one ting I noticed about the Asus's is they all seem to have 1 SODIMM slot....so no dual channel benefit? Kinda odd....Shelnutt how do you think bobcat performs...it seems the C-30, C-50 was AMD's first fusion attempt and that Zacate was them more really hitting their stride....although the Bobcat's are some cheaper...but do they run hot and have short battery?
 
under $500? It's one of those things where I'm buying a netbook because if it gets damaged or stolen backpacking in Asia it won't be as big of a loss as a full laptop (less of a target too). While $230 would be a great price I know those probably don't have the power to not be frustrating to use...this will be my only machine for 8months, web, skype, photo's, entertainment and it probably doesn't make any sense to not go dual-core at this point...it's getting pretty standard and I think Win7 will need it.
 
Win7 ran great on my single core Atom. I could play light games on it, but flash did hurt it pretty badly.

HP Mini 1030NR. 1GB of RAM, and a Single Core Atom with the GMA junk. Worked pretty well, so i'd think that Ion 2 would be great for what you want.
 
So am I correct in thinking that all 10.1" netbooks have only 1 SODIMM slot? Looks that way...I was really gravitating to the Acer 522, seems to have pretty good bang for the price and I like that 1280x720 display (all the 10.1" Asus have 1024x600) but seems weird to have dual-channel RAM and only 1 slot...thus not getting any Double Date Rate bonus.

I'm so far the only contenders left are:
HP dm1z
Eee PC 1215B PU
Eee PC 1015PN
Aspire One 522
Aspire One 722
Eee PC 1015B
Eee PC 1215B MU
Eee PC 1215N
 
Right now the HP dm1z is $355. Also, have you seen the Lenovo X120e? Pretty much identical to the dm1z.

I haven't done much research into netbooks, but I thought Zacate (E-350 right?) were the bee's knees. Are the C-30's and C-50's not far behind? I think I read the earlier AMD Neo CPUs were horrible. I also have never heard of bobcat, so what do I know.

BTW, I bought some cheap Acer 5253-BZ480 laptop. 15.6" with a E-350. I was able to watch fours hours of 720p movies, if it gives you a 'real world' indication of battery life. It also seems to do the SC2 demo reasonably (not sure on battery life for that though).
 
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I think I'm really leaning towards the Acer 522. It's $100 less than the dmz1 after bumping it to 2GB of RAM and it's $40 cheaper than the Eee PC 1015PN after bumping them both up to 2GB RAM and their benchmarks arn't showing to be that different. 1015PN slightly faster at CPU and 522 slightly faster at GPU. I think the 1280x720 resolution of the 522 will be a nice feature over the 1024x600 resolution of the 1015PN. The dm1z (and other e-350 based laptops) seems really nice but that extra $100 is probably not worth the gamble since I'm trying to keep it cheap just in case it gets stolen or ruined when the performance of a C-50 is probably going to be enough anyway.
 
code doesn't work...otherwise that would be a good deal...oh and HP charges sales tax? yuck that added $12.

I did take a look at the x120e...looks really nice and it doesn't seem to have so many cheap trade offs....but then again it's $510 which is getting right into regular laptop territory. Plus it's sold out and Lenovo even pulled it from their site it's so back ordered.
 
neonblingbling said:
Ugh, SD fail. Sorry about that.

At least it seems that you seem pretty set on the 522 anyway.
Click to expand...

Yeah...I'm just not 100% sure on build quality on either Acer or Eee Pc's never really used any...it's too bad that Asus doesn't make a 10" that goes to a higher res because a matte screen would be nice.
 
From what I can tell on the specs of the acer it's very similar to the asus 1015pn. the big difference I can see is battery life and hyperthreading. with the asus you can get almost double the battery life. I've found the hyperthreading really comes in handy using the Office 2010. The Ion chip would also really help with IE9... regardless of which you go with I'd strongly recommend an SSD upgrade, probably the most noticeable upgrade I've done.
 
Weeman said:
From what I can tell on the specs of the acer it's very similar to the asus 1015pn. the big difference I can see is battery life and hyperthreading. with the asus you can get almost double the battery life. I've found the hyperthreading really comes in handy using the Office 2010. The Ion chip would also really help with IE9... regardless of which you go with I'd strongly recommend an SSD upgrade, probably the most noticeable upgrade I've done.
Click to expand...

He'll be storing pictures on this. A SSD in that pricerange is not going to give significant amount of space for what he wants to use it for.
 
Are those (Seagate?) hybrid drives any good in this case, or are the advantages negligible since there's still a spinning disk?
 
The momentus XT's are good overall for daily use, but the upgrade from a HDD to one to a SSD, the SSD is still going to be far more noticable.
 
Doesn't the SSD get used similar to how your browser store cache files to improve load times? I believe that is what the hybrid drive does. It learns which files get used a lot and loads them into the SSD?
 
I ended up going with the Acer so I still have time to test it out and see how it works and maybe send it back before I leave and get a replacement if it seems like it's not going to work well. I don't see myself dropping a $150 SSD into a $300 netbook...part of the point is to not invest a ton of money into this laptop in case it get's stolen or broken on the trip.

I am wondering if I should put win7 32bit or 64bit on this? I might upgrade it to 4GB RAM, that's only going to cost $35. If I don't go up to 4GB is there any penalty for putting 64-bit win7 on it? Is the 64-bit version any heavier in anyway?
 
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