[question] Considering buying a Netbook

[Oskuro]

I am looking to upgrade my portable development environment, specifically by adding a computer around the USB Drive I have it in

So, I'm considering adquiring a Netbook. My main objective is to be able to whip it out anywhere as I whip out my notebooks and be able to fire up my dev programs and type code in, or do some testing, or even carry my tablet around and do some drawing.

Media, gaming, and even internet connectivity are secondary (but a good reason to get it too, specially when I have to spend 7+ hours on a bus, train or plane and want soemthing to do).

I was considering adquiring an Asus eeepc, since the whole solid-state drive is attractive, but I really don't have info on those (you know, besides what Asus says). And I might need to order it directly from them, since local retailers have usually a single model, and I'd be very interested in an eeepc model that allows replacing the drive when it inevitably burns out.

And no, I don't want to buy a fully fledged laptop, I'm very interested on the size being small enough not to require a dedicated bag for the thing.

The software I'd need it to run is:
-Eclipse (for Java/Java2d dev)
-Code:Blocks (for c++/Ogre3d dev)
-Gimp
-Blender

I want to have the whole thing run on Ubuntu, but might add a minimal windows install for testing if possible.
I don't need top-notch graphics, but enough power to handle Blender, simple Ogre3d apps, Java2d apps, and some old games (think pre-bloom era games).

I also don't mind not having an optical drive.

So... Suggestions? Advice?

[Zixinus]

My first suggestion would be to look for something with eight hours of battery life and nothing less, especially if you regularly have 7+ hours to spare. This means an eight-cell battery.

I would personally reccomend the Lenovo S10-3t but review sites seem to disagree with me. Although if you aren't looking for a touchpad, the s10-3 (without the "t") is supposed to be also good.

Asus makes good laptops and the 1001p seems to be well-recommended, with fairly low price and good battery life. EDIT: Don't buy the seashell series! They are good, minimalist and all, but you can't change the battery!

For software requirements, you just need unetbootin and a good flash drive. Netbook performances don't vary that much.

[Zixinus]

EDIT: I meant to say that if you are looking for something without the a touchscreen than the s10-3 is supposed to be also good.

SDD drives aren't very good. They are faster and take less power, but they are also expensive per gigabyte.

I also don't mind not having an optical drive.

Didn't notice this before. You are aware that a netbook is partly defined by not having an optical drive (built-in)? You can buy portable optical drives though.

[Oskuro]

I mentioned the optical drive thing because a lot of people seem fanatical about them (to the point that some newer netbooks do include one) and just wanted to dispell that.

I've been checking netbooks comparison charts (wich anger me with their tendency to showcase unrealeased products, but oh well), and yep, SSDs don't offer much storage space. Is damage due to mechanical shock something I should worry about? Because one of the things I find attractive about the SSD (appart from being silent and less power-hungry) is that I don't have to worry much about carrying the thing in my backpack, or quickly putting it away because my station is up or something.

the s10-3 looks interesting, and the touchscreen might have its uses. I'll check local retailers later to see what they have, I've only looked for eeepcs so far, since I really knew nothing about the rest.

Also, I'm kind of bothered by the amount of space taken by the speakers on the eeepcs. Couldn't they offer an speaker-less alternative? (they do offer a camera-less one)

As for battery life, most of the devices I'm seeing (with actual data on the charts, mind you) seem to be around the 6h mark, I'm guessing this is normal and I'd better get myself a seat with a power plug in my next voyage (or some sort of external/exchangeable battery).

[Zixinus]

I mentioned the optical drive thing because a lot of people seem fanatical about them (to the point that some newer netbooks do include one) and just wanted to dispell that.

Oh, sorry, your double negative confused me. Damn, I need to pay more attention (and no, I am not being sarcastic).

Is damage due to mechanical shock something I should worry about?

Only if you intend to juggle your netbook.

Because one of the things I find attractive about the SSD (appart from being silent and less power-hungry) is that I don't have to worry much about carrying the thing in my backpack, or quickly putting it away because my station is up or something.

Then you need to worry more about not having too much shit attached. You can immediately hibernate the thing.
EDIT: To explain: I hate touchpads, so I use a trackball mouse. I use in-ear earphones. If I attach the charger, it can take almost a minute or so to put away the netbook. If you use just the touchpad and perhaps earbuds, you can lower that time. Remember: hibernate command is your friend.

As for protection from the elements, I recommend that you do get a dedicated laptop bag or one of these (I have one and it works OK, more or less).

the s10-3 looks interesting, and the touchscreen might have its uses. I'll check local retailers later to see what they have, I've only looked for eeepcs so far, since I really knew nothing about the rest.

I recall that Asus has made a tablet-netbook as well. The T101H, although I think they might be using SSDs too (but I am unsure).

Also, I'm kind of bothered by the amount of space taken by the speakers on the eeepcs. Couldn't they offer an speaker-less alternative? (they do offer a camera-less one)

Buy a ear buds or in-ear headphones. They're pretty cheap, especially the earbuds.

As for battery life, most of the devices I'm seeing (with actual data on the charts, mind you) seem to be around the 6h mark, I'm guessing this is normal and I'd better get myself a seat with a power plug in my next voyage (or some sort of external/exchangeable battery).

I would recommend just buying an extra battery and learning to keep both charged. Battery life will degrade over time anyway, so the little extra bulk and weight might be worth while in the long-run.

[fractalsponge1]

Is an atom and 2gb of ram going to be fast enough for what you want to do in blender? If not, an alternative would be a CULV Core2 thin-and-light notebook. Not too much more expensive than a high-end netbook, but you get dual core, more ram, and a bigger screen. You take a slight hit to weight and battery life. Integrated graphics all, but that's what you get for something that light.

One option if cost is an issue is to look at refurbished machines; at least at Dell these come with the same warranties as new laptops, for often significantly less $$$.

[Oskuro]

I am dissapointed. I droped by a retailer this afternoon, and they let me plug in my USB drive with the dev environment. I tried it on a couple Asus Eee PC 1001 HA, one with Win7 Starter and the other with WinXP, and on a Asus Seashell with Win7 Starter too.

Now, I know I could probably get better performance by tweaking the OS, and being in display, these machines are probably not in top shape.

So, it took forever to load Eclipse on all machines (The WinXP one seemed a bit faster), Code:Blocks, on the other hand, started faster, but behaved erratically and crashed.

Compile times were awful with Eclipse, and the Phys2d demo I ran suffered considerable framerate drops, and even crashed when I pushed it a little bit.


As for typing, the screen was ok, but the keyboard was uncomfortable, yet I guess I'd get used to it.

Don't know, I felt the thing lagged a lot while processing, then again, all three machines had 1Gb RAM, and had been on all day long, not to mention all the processes that were running in the background (Probably bundled by Asus).


Now, on a more general note, is there a significant price drop if the laptop/netbook does not include a Windows OEM? Because the idea of paying for it and then promptly replacing it with Linux kind of bothers me

[Resinence]

Intel Atom is SLOW as dog shit, there is no way around this. Sorry.

Bumping up to 2GB of ram would definitely help but attempting to compile anything serious or even do any -serious- 3d stuff like sub-d modelling and zBrush/Blender's displacement sculpting on a net book is an exercise in frustration for the foreseeable future.

If you cannot even tolerate a 13" or smaller core2duo laptop that btw fit in backpacks easily then I can suggest you look for a net book with the nvidia ion architecture. Compiling will still be like drawing blood from a stone but you will at least have some semblance of 3d performance and maybe even CUDA (haven't checked if ION supports it) for preview rendering.

I'd REALLY urge you to just consider a small laptop, I did the same thing and looked at netbooks first and while they are amazing for browsing the net or typing up documents when you're out you simply won't have an enjoyable experience doing any serious processor intensive work on them. And it doesn't get much more intensive than 3d and compiling.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Toshiba has a really nice light 13" notebook with 6+ hours of battery life that is 600 or 700.

[Zixinus]

Look for laptops with 11"+ screen sizes. I found an thinkpad edge at my favourite computer store with the following vital specs:

Processzor: AMD Athlon Neo X2 Dual-Core L325 (1.5Ghz, 1MB L2, 800MHz FSB)
Memória: 2x2GB DDR2 667Mhz
HDD: 320GB
VGA: ATI Radeon HD 3200

[Dragon Angel]

It's not exactly a netbook per se, but it does come extremely close to being one: the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e. I am thinking of even buying this one myself, especially since I personally saw it in action when a Lenovo salesman came to our office (my university was very good friends with IBM at one point, and that friendship transferred over to Lenovo) - it has an ATI Radeon HD 3200 instead of your standard Intel GMA, and the desktop resolution is one step higher than other netbooks: 1366x768 instead of 1024x600, at a physical screen size of about 11.6".

Whether it has good Linux support, though, is something that I do not know... You may want to conduct further research in that area.

Addition: It seems that Lenovo is offering a special deal right now with the X100e too; for the same price, you could upgrade the Athlon Neo X2 to a Turion Neo X2 (more or less the same processor with apparently 512KB more L2 cache, which is always nice to have).

[Stark]

Buying a netbook for development is brain-damaged.

Like Zix etc says there are plenty of smaller laptops that will work far, far better than any netbook. Netbooks are designed to be a large smartphone, after all.

[Oskuro]

Yeah, I'm seeing that. Guess I'll pass on the whole thing, I really don't need a laptop, hence my looking for an inexpensive portable alternative for some casual coding and drawing, but if there is no option, then I'll keep using a paper notebook


(I was also secretely trying to nudge my friends so they got me one for my birthday, guess I'll have to scrap that).

[Pu-239]

It's not exactly a netbook per se, but it does come extremely close to being one: the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e. I am thinking of even buying this one myself, especially since I personally saw it in action when a Lenovo salesman came to our office (my university was very good friends with IBM at one point, and that friendship transferred over to Lenovo) - it has an ATI Radeon HD 3200 instead of your standard Intel GMA, and the desktop resolution is one step higher than other netbooks: 1366x768 instead of 1024x600, at a physical screen size of about 11.6".

Whether it has good Linux support, though, is something that I do not know... You may want to conduct further research in that area.

Addition: It seems that Lenovo is offering a special deal right now with the X100e too; for the same price, you could upgrade the Athlon Neo X2 to a Turion Neo X2 (more or less the same processor with apparently 512KB more L2 cache, which is always nice to have).

Unfortunately the X100e's battery life is pretty shitty. An older refurbed X-series is probably a better fit for his requirements.

[Oskuro]

The Lenovo ThinkPad is a bit pricey, and from what I can see in their site, there aren't that many retailers that carry them in Barcelona, wich probably means they will only have the newer (and thus more expensive) models in stock.
Also, I love how the UK site has this software customization tab, yet they won't let me deselect the OS (or any other software).

Guess I'll drop by one of them next week, and see if they let me give their machines a try (I might even carry a netbook linux distro on a stick).

[The Grim Squeaker]

Has anyone tried the Alienware m11x netbook?

I'm looking for an ultralight that's also gaming capable. A 9 inch netbook is just too small for me (the Alienware is 11.6).

[Stark]

Whoa that's funny stuff.

Netbook = cheap
Alienware = overpriced

[Zixinus]

Just to note:
The laptop I listed above costs at my shop 150k Forints (it's a ThinkPad Edge L325 NUE6JHV, without an optical drive).
The Lenovo s10-3t (standard) costs about 131k Forints.

Now, I obviously don't know what the prices are in Barcelona, but I think that what you want is not that far away from what you initially said you wanted. I prefer the touchpoint, so then you wouldn't have to buy a mouse (there is also a standard-issue touchpad).
Buy a case, an extra battery and some earplugs and you'd be all set.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Has anyone tried the Alienware m11x netbook?

I'm looking for an ultralight that's also gaming capable. A 9 inch netbook is just too small for me (the Alienware is 11.6).

I have an M11x. It's gaming performance is really rather impressive with the caveat that the CPU is a bottleneck, so physics heavy games like Red Faction Guerilla or the Force Unleashed are only playable on medium settings, whereas others like Supreme Commander 2 or OFP Dragon Rising run happily on the highest settings. Check YouTube for videos of it playing various games to get an idea of what it can do.

Bear in mind though that although it is small and very handy it's certainly not "ultralight" - you will feel that lump in your bag; that said I still carry it to work with me most days.

Anyway overall I am very pleased with it - I can plug into my TV via HDMI and play games at 1080p using a 360 controller, or I can turn off the graphics card and still have a very capable Win7 system that lasts maybe 6-7 hours on battery; that versatility is extremely useful.

An alternative you might want to look at is the ION based Asus 1201n - I very nearly bought one of these before the M11x came out. It has respectable 3D performance (no where near the M11x, but nothing else does at that size) while being significantly cheaper. Again, check YouTube for videos of how it manages various games.

[Starglider]

If you cannot even tolerate a 13" or smaller core2duo laptop that btw fit in backpacks easily then I can suggest you look for a net book with the nvidia ion architecture. Compiling will still be like drawing blood from a stone but you will at least have some semblance of 3d performance and maybe even CUDA (haven't checked if ION supports it) for preview rendering.

Consider getting an ultra-cheap netbook and running VNC, an X server or a similar remote desktop app to access your awesome workstation (you do have an awesome workstation right?). If you're using this mostly on home wireless it will work fine. If elsewhere, might be practical, if you have a 3G wireless Internet subscription. Personally I'm already having problems trying to use my quad core / Radeon 3870 / 17" laptop for development; it sufficed when I first got it, but now I'm doing OpenCL stuff that really needs a DirectX 11 GPU (it will run in CPU emulation mode, but very slowly).

[Oskuro]

Whoa that's funny stuff.

Netbook = cheap
Alienware = overpriced

Actually, the funny part is that some of the newer netbooks I've seen these days are priced at 2000$ or so, and the Alienware model mentioned is around 1000$ (all these on the official sites). But, then again, many of these newer netbooks are aimed at overexpending enterprise professionals.

Consider getting an ultra-cheap netbook and running VNC, an X server or a similar remote desktop app to access your awesome workstation (you do have an awesome workstation right?). If you're using this mostly on home wireless it will work fine. If elsewhere, might be practical, if you have a 3G wireless Internet subscription.

That'd be a nice idea if internet subscriptions and wireless coverage didn't suck as they do around here. Although now that I think of it, some phone companies give away netbooks if you subscribe to their 3G plan, might look into it and make some numbers and... Oh, wait, won't do much good if my flatmate is hogging all the bandwith with his constant downloading (really, some people are really obsessed with downloading everything under the sun, I bet there's some syndrome to describe that).

[Starglider]

Oh, wait, won't do much good if my flatmate is hogging all the bandwith with his constant downloading (really, some people are really obsessed with downloading everything under the sun, I bet there's some syndrome to describe that).

That may not be a problem actually, remote access to your workstation stresses upload bandwidth rather than download. Though, if he is using Bittorrent he might be saturating both. In which case you throttle / QoS him at the router.

[Oskuro]

That may not be a problem actually, remote access to your workstation stresses upload bandwidth rather than download. Though, if he is using Bittorrent he might be saturating both. In which case you throttle / QoS him at the router.

He uses both emule and direct download. I have to shut down wireless access at the router whenever I need to use the connection at home, since the configuration program is retarded and won't let me throttle his rate properly (Router was provided by the ISP, and has a "for dummies" config screen). One of the perks of being the only one with actual computer knowledge, though, is that I can claim the connection is wonky when he loses it, and he'll believe it.

Anyway, that's a temporal problem in any case (I'll eventually move to another flat, hopefully on my own), so I'll look into the remote access option for processor intensive tasks, it's really interesting.

I wonder how well do the tablet notebooks perform with art programs, though. Not having to carry the table around would certainly be a plus (although they look expensive).

[Oskuro]

As I've been told by someone at the office who has a netbook, the internet connection packages offered are too crappy to support virtual desktops (the graphics sent for the actual desktop update seem to eat it all up), but it might be viable if I find a coffee shop with a decent wireless network.

Of course, since the game programming I do uses processor-raping physics engines I doubt I could make do with "compile simple stuff" on the netbook.

I wonder how hard would it be to set my workstation up so I can submit the code for remote compiling and get back the code without using the graphical interface. I also wonder if such a solution would be complex enough to warrant a slap on my face followed by a "get a laptop you moron".

I also have a fairly old Thinkpad model before me right now, and the size is nice, although a bit on the large side. I'll have to wait for its owner to step out for a coffee break to try it out ( heh, kidding).