Stealth97

iTrader: (5)

yeah, I really don't know what they were thinking when they ditched ethernet. I'm not sure what else out there is small, light, and fast that has not been mentioned, but I wish you luck on your quest. I know how hard it can be to find a machine that is exactly what you want without comprimises.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Just got back from Fry's where I had some hands-on time with the Acer 1830T. Pretty nice machine, actually. It's almost an exact match for my VGN size-wise, and they keyboard is really quite nice indeed. (A few reviews I've read criticized the keyboard- I assume that the people who wrote these were the products of seventh-generation intermarriage.)

Two things bothered me a little bit. The display isn't quite as awesome as what I'm accustomed to- less saturated and slightly lower contrast. This was obvious only because it was sitting right next to a Vaio X, and I can live with it.

The touchpad bugged me, though. It's not smooth, not in the least. Basically, it blends into the rest of the top cover, which has a texture consisting of rough and irregular horizontal ridges running across it. What this means is that it offers a vastly different amount of resistance to a finger running across it in a vertical direction vs. a horizontal direction, like what would happen if a piece of 60-grit sandpaper were projected into a one-dimensional universe. Kinda weird. The fact that it blends right into the rest of the top surface also means that while you can see where the boundaries of the touch-enabled surface are, you can't feel them. In particular, this made it very hard for me to locate and smoothly operate the scroll feature which is standard on most touchpads, by sliding up and down along the right edge of the pad.

Oddly, I've not heard of one reviewer complaining about this. They complained about the size (which doesn't bother me at all) but not the texture. Maybe I'm being overly sensative?

I was all set and ready to walk out the door with that machine, too. Now I have doubt.

kaisersoze

iTrader: (8)

Ok easier to see why an external battery might not work for your needs but remember these batteries will also charge the onboard battery while powering the system so you could squeeze more free time out after being plugged in and I think they use the same apple AC adapter(I could be wrong) so no additional cords(the battery to laptop cord is integrated I think.
As far as ethernet it is a $10-20 external USB adapter for the 5% of the time you need LAN access.

curly

iTrader: (25)

Some laptops at work have that touch pad, or at least one similar. It's full of small holes, designating the outer boundary but it is more difficult to feel the edges over the older recessed style. I'm not a huge fan, and I don't use it enough to know if I like it or not.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yes, I'm sure there are ways to make the experience less frustrating. But in the end, it's just a nuisance that I don't want to deal with.

FWIW, utilizing this extra battery system requires a total of five additional power cables/devices (plus the battery itself):

1: The battery requires (and includes) its own charger, which is similar to the charger that an intel-style laptop would use (It has a standard coaxial DC jack rather than a proprietary mag-break thingy.)

2: Plus the AC cable for the above charger.

3: To connect the battery to the laptop, you first buy a MagSafe airline adapter from Apple,

4: Attach the little adapter that turns the airline plug into an auto-style plug, and then

5: You connect that cable+adapter combo to yet another cable (included w/ the hypermac) which adapts it to plug into the battery.

They even have pictures illustrating this:








That's it. It's done. I am not lugging around two chargers and a mess of other cables just to emulate a feature that has been standard on every other laptop computer since the Tandy model 100 was released in 1983.


I use my laptop to configure and manage audio consoles and routers made by my company. This is done by connecting to their 10Base-T ethernet port via an ethernet crossover cable. Thus, when I am in the field doing my job, I need wired ethernet access roughly 100% of the time, and having a dongle hanging from the side of the machine to accomplish this is just one more trivial little annoyance that I don't need.


I really wanted to like the Air. I thought "Ok, this is my chance to finally prove that I'm not a Windows bigot (even though I planned to run Windows on it) and own something that some hippie in a turtleneck who is dying of cancer (again) says is trendy and fashionable."

I've given it due consideration, but Apple is just not in the running at this point. Until Apple produces something with an ethernet jack, a user-replacable battery, a processor that hasn't been discontinued, and (preferably) a VGA or HDMI port, they just aren't going to find their way into my backpack.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I've seen the style you mean. Can't recall whether it was on an HP or a Fuji- one of those two I think. And I don't mind those.

This is different. It's actually rough, like dragging your finger across the grain of coarsely-hewn wood.

Which actually gives me an idea. I wonder what a bit of 400 and 800 grit sandpaper followed by polishing compound might accomplish here? It's entirely possible that this might not be a lost cause.

blaen99

iTrader: (6)

You may want to rethink that, depending on what technology is used on that touchpad Joe.

Touchpads use capacitance to detect fingers, and depending on what technology is used that may destroy how the touchpad detects your finger.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

if your concern is scrolling, look into the two-finger-scroll hack for synaptics touchpads and see if the laptop in question has one.

http://lifehacker.com/5493849/get-ma...windows-laptop

I don't like having the side scroll thing. I like knowing that when I put down a second finger, I get scroll.

You can also do 3 and 4-finger gestures if you so desire. It's a very useful hack.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I'd like to begin by sharing with you all a poem which I recently composed:

**** you, Sony.

You invented the high-end ultraportable category, and then abandoned it to lesser entities.
The Vaio TX, TZ and TT, great machines they all, and overpriced;
yet we faithful flocked to your tit with our dollars each time, though your founder a turtleneck did not wear.

Now we have nothing, alone in the darkness we wail,
For the Vaio X, the lightest, thinnest, awesomest machine yet;
Though it cost $1,500, be crippled with an Atom processor (and the attendant limitation of 2GB of RAM, which is imposed by the licensing restrictions of Microsoft and Intel.)

Knew this you did, and yet- the fall.

I hope that you die of AIDS, but you are a corporation;

I hope that you die of corporate AIDS.

This is getting hard. The Acer is out. I simply cannot abide that horrible touchpad. Damn shame, as it was perfect otherwise.

I've made a grid. Engineers like grids. For reference, these prices are not baselines, but are as-configured the way I'd probably buy them, which includes things like RAM upgrades, bluetooth modules, and six-cell batteries where optional, but does not include upgrading the hard drive to an SSD:



That E4200 is still clearly king. It's the lightest, the second-smallest, and while it's not an i-series processor, the Core2Duo SU9600 is still a pretty good chip, having the lowest TDP of the bunch at a mere 10 watts despite supporting most of the current-gen features (no turbo boost or hyperthreading, though.) On the plus side, a 128 GB SSD is standard, so knock $280 off the price for comparative purposes (making it still the most expensive machine in the lot, but by a smaller margin.) And the fact that it comes standard with a 32 bit OS is a plus for me. (Yes, I've heard all your cautionary tales, and yes, I understand the address-space limitation on RAM. Trust me, I have a reason for this logic.)

A couple of the Fujis are looking ok. The T580 is dimensionally similar to my TX, though it has only a 10" screen (vs. 11.6"), while the P770 has a 12" screen yet is nearly a full inch deeper (depth front-to-back is really my most critical dimension.)


Then there's this other machine which I stumbled across yesterday at Fry's. The HP DM1Z.



I spent some time playing with it. Excellent keyboard, good trackpad (the buttons are a bit weird, but I think I could get used to them) adequate (though not awesome) screen... It's not the smallest or the fastest or the lightest, but real-world reports say that the battery life is pretty awesome.


But... it's an AMD.


Honestly, I don't know **** about AMD processors apart from that I haven't owned one since the 486 era, back when they were targeting the bottom of the market with shitty, under-performing CPUs and using confusing and deceptive marketing tactics to sell them. Actually, I guess not much has changed, really.

So I'm at an impasse. The Zacate processor architecture is fairly new (it was released to the public two weeks ago) so there's not a ton of real-world data on it. The reviews I've seen show that graphics performance is far superior to the competition (which I don't care about) but that general-purpose processor performance is midrange at best. While varying between "slightly better than a D-series Atom" to "Quite a lot better than a D-series Atom" depending on who you read, it consistently lags way behind even the lowest-end offerings in the Intel Arrandale family.

So here's my dilemna: how the hell do I compare this machine to what I have now?

On the plus side, RAM is expandable to 8 GB. Frankly, that's one of my big problems right now- my TX is maxxed out at 1.5 GB, and it spends a lot of time disk-bound. Tripling the RAM would probably solve a lot of problems right off.

But in terms of processor power, how the heck do I compare the AMD Zacate E-350 processor to my current Intel Yonah-architecture U1400 Core Solo?


More Graphs!


I finally managed to locate a website which has comparative benchmarks of all sorts of different CPUs- not just the modern stuff, but classics as well. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

Here are all of the current contenders ranked on the Passmark Performance Test benchmark scale, which measures general CPU performance but excludes things like I/O and graphics:



So, what to make of it? Well, the Atom 550 did outperform my current machine by a surprising margin, but the 2 GB ram limit has already excluded those machines from the competition. The E-350 fared reasonably well, but as predicted, underperformed all of the newer Core processors. (What really surprised me is how closely the old Penryn-3M Core2 Duo fared against the Arrandale i3. That Dell E4200 is still a contender.)

But how to interpret the data? Is 500 twice as much as 250? Is 1,500 three times as much as 500? I mean, where would an 8086 fall on that scale? Would it be 1 or .0000000000000001?

And of course, it gets really depressing when you overlay the desktop processors at the same scale:



Funny, my desktop machine at home (an i5-750) doesn't feel seventeen times faster than my laptop. 2 or 3 times, maybe.

curly

iTrader: (25)

I think they're toshiba netbooks with swivel touchscreens. I guess these days that makes them a tablet?

I like your grids. Compare more.

Stealth97

iTrader: (5)

anything more than $300 with anything running on an atom class processor is a damn ripoff.

The netbook market was more entertaining before it was called a netbook, while microsoft stayed the hell out

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

I didn't have a good chance to double check it before, but the recently upgraded version of the Inspiron 11z I tried comes with the Intel Core i3-330UM processor, 11.6" HD display, 2GB memory upgradable to 4GB, 250MB HDD, 3.44 lbs., 3 USB 2.0 ports, RJ45 Ethernet, VGA, and two mini card slots (whatever that means). It also says this: 7-in-1 Flash memory reader supporting SD, SDHC, MMC,MMC+, xD, MS, MS Pro Transfer files quickly from your digital devices by plugging the card in instead of carrying and connecting USB adapters.

http://shop.sprint.com/NASApp/online...wZipCode=33563

mcarp22

^_^

I think the 4200 only holds 3gb of memory max.

ianferrell

Depending on what os you're using you may have some issues with 32bit and more than 4gb of ram, here's some info from microsoft.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Hmm. It doesn't show up in Dell's current catalog, but there are still some in the used/refurb market for not too much money. The reviews on them aren't great, though. Battery life on the 6-cell version is supposed to be good, but that's apparently the only thing folks are liking about it.

"With a 3 cell battery, the laptop is just under an inch thick. But a 6 cell battery adds almost an inch to the height of the laptop in the rear. That causes the keyboard to tilt at an almost-but-not-quite uncomfortable angle. While it’s fairly common for PC makers to add a little tilt to the keyboard, I don’t think I’ve ever used a PC with a keyboard angled quite as sharply as the one on the Dell Inspiron 11z."

"In a series of benchmarks, the Inspiron 11z fell somewhere between a notebook with an Intel Celeron SU2300 CULV processor and one with a more powerful Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 CPU."

"The Dell Inspiron 11z’s touchpad is pretty much the same one used on the Inspiron Mini 10v, but bigger. You would have thought Dell could have used that extra space to place right and left buttons below the touchpad instead of integrating them into the touch area. But they didn’t. And so find this touchpad just as frustrating to use as the one on Dell’s 10 inch netbook. The idea is that Dell can provide a larger touch surface by using integrated buttons. But this means that in order to click, you need to move your finger to the lower right or left portion of the touchpad and press down. It also means that you have to be very careful not to move the finger you’re using to click, lest you should accidentally move the cursor."

"If you intend to use the built in touch bad a lot you may be in for major annoyance. On almost any review you read about this laptop they will complain about this touchpad. I agree with them. it is what stops this laptop from being FANTASTIC. "

"One Con, which is the touch pad. It's the terribly worst touch pad I have ever used in my life. I even used a cover to dis-function it. "

"I find the touchpad unusable, even more than other notebook touchpads, and even with all the special gestures disabled, especially because the integrated mouse button substitutes are too stiff."

"The touchpad on the 11z is the first one that I absolutely can't stand to use. Some notebooks have laggy touchpads which might be annoying, but they are still usable. This is not the case with the all-in-one touchpad on the 11z. Dell decided to copy Apple by going with integral buttons under the touchpad surface, but didn't design the hardware or driver support correctly. On a MacBook if you have a finger resting on the touchpad surface to trigger the button while selecting text or moving around objects, it can tell the difference. It knows that finger shouldn't be recognized as a variable in the multi-touch movements or standard movements; the Elan touchpad can't."

My recent experience with the Acer made me really appreciate the value of a good touchpad. And this doesn't seem to be one.






I am looking at the Dell service manual for it right now. Both the SU9400 and SU9600 models of the E4200 have 1GB on-board and one memory socket which will accommodate a 1, 2 or 4 GB DIMM, for a total of 2, 3 or 5 GB pf physical RAM.






Some folks are failing pretty hard today at reading comprehension... Quoting myself from the first time I addressed this:... and from the second time I addressed this:Yes. I get it. I understand how address space works. I have been working with microprocessor-based computers since they came with 16k of RAM and you could actually print out the entire memory map and hang it on your wall.

The reality of the situation is that the one database application I use which places the most stringent demands on the machine just so happens to be the one that absolutely will not run in a 64 bit environment. So I can either run it in a 32 bit environment natively, or I can run it in a 32 bit environment inside a virtual machine. Which do you think will be easier / faster / more reliable?





**** just got real. I found a source, local to me, no less, of refurbed E4200s for hella-cheap. (That's right, I used the word "hella", and the phrase "**** just got real." What are you going to do about it?) So how's this:



Again, these dollar values are "as-configured". At today's prices, figure an extra $280 for a 128 GB SSD, and the effective price of the HP rises to $805. Add another $40 for an external DVD drive and it's a full $100 more than the Dell. For that $100, I can pick up a second 6-cell battery for the Dell, which I can carry around with me for less than the 1lb differential. So the Dell is faster, cheaper, has more battery power, a slightly better touchpad (the HP has soft-buttons, which get cranky when you rest your thumb on them), eSATA, metal hinges, and doesn't require me to use VMware for 32 bit apps.

Can anybody think of a reason for me not to buy this?

curly

iTrader: (25)

Dude you'd be getting a Dell.

mcarp22

Aha, I guess 4GB modules weren't available at RTM (like 2008) when I was trained on them.

For that price on a refurb, I don't think you can do better!

ianferrell

I read your post about the library for the DB, I understand that, and realize why you don't want to run a virtual machine. Is there a way to get 32bit XP to use more than 4gb of ram though? I honestly thought saying that might help because buying a machine w/ 8gb of ram and only being able to use half of it would be kinda lame. My current home laptop has 4gb in it and due to some bios limitation can only use 3 of it, kind of annoying, but 2gb chips are cheap and 3 > 2.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Not that I'm aware of- we're dealing with a physical limitation. If you have 32 address bits, you have a total of 4,294,967,296 addressable locations, and some of that space needs to be reserved for things other than physical RAM.

It's not as though I'm locking myself into a corner here. The E4200 is still a 64 bit machine, I'm just buying a version of it that includes a 32 bit OS. If at some point in the future Sid manages to transplant VMCC into a 64 bit-compliant library, then I can always upgrade. Until then, I can live with wasting 1 GB of RAM (especially at $10 a gig.)

y8s

iTrader: (8)

most processors have been 64-bit capable since before there was a mainstream 64-bit OS. but I agree that 3.2GB of useable memory is adequate for most non-3D applications that will be tolerable to use on a sub-12" screen.

I ran into the limitation at work where I open large complex surfaced CAD models and it made me cry a little. memory IS cheap, but if you hit a ceiling, then what's the point?

on a sidenote: bill gates never said that 640k is enough for anyone.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484