First Full Review of New Asus Eee PC 900 266
An anonymous reader writes "After months of rumors, the new 8.9in screen Eee PC is out in the open and the first review is online. As well as the larger screen you get 1GB RAM, 20GB Storage and a multi-touch touchpad. It costs more than the old Eee PC, but it definitely sounds like it's worth the extra cash." I always thought the appeal of the original was the ridiculously low price, coupled with the ease of hacking. Not sure if the sequel will meet that challenge.
Battery life is a major downside (Score:5, Interesting)
Phone/computer hybrid (Score:5, Interesting)
Toying with that formula is unwise. Instead, further pare down the bloated Xandros and XP installs so that people can use a 4-8 GB machine.
I thought they were going to install Intel's Atom in the next revision?
Regardless, the Eee is an important step for open source and Linux. See Asus Micro Laptop Brings Linux to the Desktop [chrisblanc.org].
Evangelize (Score:5, Interesting)
Well you could've fooled me. They're doing a better job than those that are doing it deliberately. 20G vs 12G, sweet.
Re:Asus Competitors Competitors (Score:3, Interesting)
They Didn't get the Weighting Right (Score:5, Interesting)
HPC Pro does the trick better. (Score:2, Interesting)
I picked up a couple of NEC MobilePro machines for $50 on eBay. Windows CE 3, with Pocket Office, Pocket Internet Explorer, etc. I also picked up a Cabletron Roamabout PCMCIA wireless card for $10 with free shipping.
I get:
- Touch-type-able keyboard same as Eee PC
- Less weight
- Less bulk
- Instant on, instant off
- MS Pocket Office and a reasonable range of CE apps
- Many hours of battery life (at least 6)
- If you really need "FULL" Office, you can get SoftMaker office for $100
Just for fun, I tried installing NetBSD on one of these with X using a 4GB CF card and it worked fine, just like any X desktop. But I decided that I just wanted the original functionality so it's back to Windows CE for me, with 4GB of storage and a touch-type-able keyboard and all for $60 cash, and it's small enough to sit on your lap, open, on the subway even in rush hour crowds, which can't be said for the Eee PC.
Re:xp? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Battery life is a major downside (Score:1, Interesting)
Also consider this is with sound / wireless and full brightness on.
I don't always need sound / wireless on.
I've already put my eeepc up for sale I'm getting one of these e900's pronto
Re:xp? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course on Linux you can easily hold the ALT key and drag the window to make the buttons visible. Not possible on windows without third party hacks.
Re:Battery life is a major downside (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Asus Competitors Competitors (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Their choice of Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Asus Competitors Competitors (Score:2, Interesting)
Much improved, but competition coming soon (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Their choice of Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Battery life is a major downside (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course all evidence is anecdotal, even your acer story. I know what I'm talking about as much as you do.
So, umm, yes. I really do use Linux. I am a Linux system administrator and developer. I last touched windows on anything I owned over 10 years ago. I don't consider myself an evangelist, but I do promote linux as much as possible and our organization runs its server room 100% on linux and has for years. In short, Linux kicks butt.
Here's the deal. I've wanted to replace my PowerBook 12" for a couple of years now, so I've looked at the options. I'd prefer a Linux laptop. Every laptop I've looked at (Thinkpad X61, Dell Latitude D420, etc) all look really good in terms of specifications and do generally run Linux pretty well. But everyone that owns them and runs linux on them puts up with things like suspend to disk instead of suspend to RAM, and abysmal battery life, like 4 hours on the biggest batteries (like 8 or 9 cells). Right now I have a Windows user (XP) with a D420 and the standard battery. He gets 5 hours when aggressive management is turned on. Another user running Linux, on the other hand, hits 3 hours at most. *Every* linux laptop user I know has to fudge with ACPI scripts and things to get the various suspend and hibernate modes to work. This is partly the fault of linux distributions and partly fault of hardware manufacturers.
Running powertop on a laptop is also very revealing. Typical desktop software on linux is not very friendly to power management. Rarely does the CPU enter the lowest power mode on linux (forget the designation).
So do a bit of research and you'll see that what I'm talking about is generally true. Thinks are improving dramatically, but there's a long, long ways to go. Until then, it's really hard to leave my 5 year old PowerBook with OS X.
Re:the photos (Score:3, Interesting)
But for other uses, casual uses especially, a small, light, chuck-it-in-the-bag device is far more appealing. Oh, it's cheap as well, so it won't be too precious.
Different people have different needs. You clearly need that 17" laptop on the train (if you get a seat, or have the space to open the lid because the seat in front is too close). My 12" iBook is a good size for my mobile needs, but most of what I use a 7" or 9" device would suffice.
Tweaking Linux and XP to minimise flash writes (Score:3, Interesting)
The write cycles are across each individual erase block (something like 32 to 128 Kbyte), not per sector/page. Bad block management is critical to 'wear levelling' - as one erase block gets worn out (flagged by ECC) the data is moved across to a new erase block. As long as there are enough good erase blocks and you aren't doing a lot of writes to every part of the drive, there should be enough good blocks around to substitute for bad blocks. There's also work to ensure that if power is lost while multiple pages are written to an erase block, the drive can detect which were written OK - it then reads these and writes them to a new erase block, marking the old erase block as bad. The flash drive has a software Flash Translation Layer (FTL) that hides all this complexity, and the better vendors put more effort into good FTLs.
So... Some care is needed to install another Linux distro, or standard XP, onto the eee - not to get it installed, but to avoid wearing out the eee's flash drives too quickly. There are various flash-optimised Linux distros including Damn Small Linux (DSL, http://damnsmalllinux.org/ [damnsmalllinux.org] Puppy, SLAX, Debian Live (http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/), etc, which manage to write infrequently to flash by running from a RAM disk (with no swap on flash, or at least reduced 'swappiness' parameter) and using unionfs or aufs to map a RAM drive 'over' the flash drive, allowing writes to be delayed until much later, and thereby minimising number of flash writes. DSL writes only when you shut down, or on demand, and Puppy writes every 30 minutes or so. Generally, Live CD distros are quite easily adapted to run well with flash, whereas hard disk distros do not run well on flash.
Ubuntu for eee looks very nice if you like Ubuntu, but doesn't do any flash optimisation that I could see from its wiki (apart from recommending use of noatime in fstab which is quite basic) - perhaps someone has done this as an add-on though. XP embedded apparently has some tweaks to do the same thing as Linux, but you need to be quite a techie to find and apply the flash optimisations, compared to simply installing Damn Small Linux which is already flash optimised.
There seems to be a lot of confusion on this - a good summary of this from eee perspective is http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=297632 [archlinux.org]. However, some people actually advocate removing unionfs from the eee Xandros setup in order to gain some flexibility, without even mentioning the issue of increased flash wear - see http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:removeunionfs [eeeuser.com] which also suggests use of ext3 which will further increase flash writes (default is to write to log every 5 seconds typically). This is a really bad idea... I would really suggest reading up on this before changing the default setup, which uses unionfs in a similar way to DSL and Puppy Linux to minimise flash writes.
Does anyone know a major distro that runs on the eee and is already flash optimised to minimise writes?