What's The Perfect Balance For a Budget Laptop? 375
cheapbob writes "Recently HP officially unveiled a budget ultraportable laptop aimed to compete with the likes of Asus Eee PC. According to Compal, one of Dell's assemblers, Dell is also going to enter the budget ultra-portable market soon. All of these devices lack many of the features associated with larger-sized laptops, such as optical drives and large amounts of storage space, yet demand for them is very high. Initial reviews of these devices unsurprisingly expose them to be underpowered and lacklustre. What's the appeal? What do you think is the perfect balance of features and price point for a budget laptop?"
I don't like the direction they're taking (Score:3, Interesting)
My criteria is pretty much (1) As much power as possible under (2) a reasonable price. All other things being equal, I'll probably select a smaller laptop, but I would gladly sacrifice a couple pounds for a larger HD, a DVD-Rom, expandability, or a full assortment of ports.
I know some people do care, but for me thickness has about as much bearing on my choice as the thing's color.
$99.99 in a blisterpack hanging near the checkout. (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, that's my price point for getting a toy-ish low featured laptop, although they are featured-enough, solid state drive is fine, lowerpowered CPU is fine, just not be skimpy with the RAM, at least a gig or two.. The original OLPC hundred buck idea would be nice then.
So, you richer guys, get crackin and buy a zillion of them for what they are asking now, so the price can drop some more..heh.
Budget vs Ultraportable (Score:5, Interesting)
If the question is truly about Budget and "powerful enough", obviously the thing won't be ultraportable. You can get a reasonable machine (~5 lbs, 14" screen, low-end Core Duo or Turion based) for about $500, or even lower if you look for sales or rebates.
You can then add a cheap or free office suite (e.g. OpenOffice), Firefox, etc., and you're ready to go.
Re:depends on your salary (Score:3, Interesting)
good luck with your Suse system when you need to run MS Office for compatibility reasons, or Photoshop or basically any app found in the bussiness world.
If you are a student, then yeah, time have no value, to use suse.
I use Linux too. But I use it on my servers and the laptops that have to work with servers. but I don't use it on my bussiness or personal laptops.
Don't want one (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the biggest appeal of these "budget" laptops is just that -- the price fits most people's budgets.
Re:4 hours commuting a day... (Score:2, Interesting)
What tablets were supposed to be (Score:4, Interesting)
Couldn't fit-in any more hyphens.
Re:4 hours commuting a day... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The Appeal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you tried running the latest version of Windows/Office? It's no wonder that people expect ball-burning laptops. I would have gone and got an "underpowered" machine if they existed when I settled on my MacBook as a pseudo desktop replacement.
The appeal of the Eee and OLPC is they don't run Windows so they can be "underpowered" as hell and still work really well. A Windows Eee is just the worst piece of shit I ever saw; they won't sell to the masses with Linux and they're too slow for the masses with Windows. They can't win.
Re:The Appeal? (Score:5, Interesting)
XP isn't too much of a resource hog even with all the chrome on, and you can turn most of it off if it does impact performance.
It's really no different than the Duron 800Mhzish I had back in the early 2000s. The only downside is the small screen, but the 2nd generation fixes that this year with a full-sized 9" 1000x600 screen.
Simple (Score:3, Interesting)
These new gen small notebooks are the perfect size, plenty small enough to carry round but big enough to be able to display web pages properly and maintain a proper keyboard.
I'm not sure why anyone would say they're underpowered or lacklustre though, unless you're expecting to play Crysis on it then the spec is just find, people have been happily creating spreadsheets, presentations, word documents, doing e-mail, browsing the web ever since the 486 era. You're not going to be playing the latest and greatest games on them it's silly to think so, we don't have the tech. to put that much power in such a small size at a reasonable price point but if you want to use it to do every day stuff you do on a computer I'd argue it's better than a laptop and better than a PDA because it has the advantages of both without the disadvantages (well except proper laptops have better specs, but gaming laptops are so big and bulk they may as well be in the desktop category anyway!).
The new sub-notebooks fill a niche that was filled then emptied again over the past decade or so. I found an old 486 laptop at work not so long ago that funnily enough whilst fatter than the new gen notebooks wasn't really much deeper or wider. Similarly Apple did away with their nice small notebooks and upped the size an inch or so when they went Intel - I'm not sure what the Air was all about either, it's just as wide and deep but extremely thin, to me thinness really doesn't solve anything and just makes me worry I'll snap it or something!
Light is portable, small is chic. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've had a nice 15.4" HP laptop before. It stayed at home on my desk because it was bulky to carry anywhere and fragile-feeling. My Eee is so small and light that I'm not afraid I will drop it nor am I afraid to drop it. Light weight and small size is nice. I carry my Eee everywhere.
I am running an nLited version of XP SP3 on mine because I just want it to work and I don't want to spend hours in terminal to make Linux do the same things the Windows software I already have. The only thing I can't get it to do that I wish it would? Run the old Tony Hawk games. The system specs are more than enough but the game doesn't like the bastard resolution.
The Asus EEE Killer Features (Score:4, Interesting)
+ Small.
+ Durable.
+ Full PC - runs all PC stuff I need.
+ Sacrafices Optical for durability, size and price == good move - I don't want to watch DVDs on a small thing like that anyway. I *do* however, want to use OpenOffice in a pinch.
+ No extra custom gadget connectivity stuff needed. Supports all standard ports out of the box. Means: Ready for universal flexible use. Cheap.
+ No obscure custom purpose 'Pocket OS'. Linux beats Palm OS any time of the day.
+ Linux preinstalled, Debian Variant being a big bonus. I'm a programmer and an IT pro. I want to use a Computer, not a pimped out virii-ridden slowpocking typewriter that needs DirectX to render it's desktop.
Now only if I could get one. These things are hard to come by right now.
A new Operating System (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a Macbook, and I love it. But if I wanted something on a budget that was going to be my utility system for lugging around and doing office-type tasks, the last thing I'd want to use is a full-blown desktop OS. There really needs to be a new kind of system designed for portable machines that's designed for ease of use, low power consumption, and high grades of flexibility without needing to wade through a typical desktop interface.
If I were designing a new OS for one of these systems, I'd want something that handled software installation and deletion similarly to OS X. You drag a file into Applications or wherever, and it runs when you click it. I would want accessory and connectivity options designed along the lines of a
PDA - illustrative graphical things you toggle on and off with virtual switches. I'd want a heavily customized and graphically streamlined version of Open Office to handle documents. A modified version of Firefox made to work within the context of a special application control bar similar to a combination of the OS X task bar and the Windows tray.
Linux is just not a good platform for something like this as it currently stands. I for one never want to worry about whether or not my glibc is the right fucking version before I install software. (It's been a while since I used a mainstream distro for longer than a few days) And I know that if I don't want to know it, my mom sure the hell wouldn't when she saw a neat new gadget to install on her email device.
Insofar as hardware goes, I think Intel has the right processor coming out with Atom. If a system like I just described was written from the ground up, a gigabyte of RAM should be plenty - but go for two so you can use one as a disk cache for even more speed improvement. Again, a custom OS and streamlined applications could be easily done within a few gigabytes of hard drive. And there's no reason an 8G internal flash source wouldn't work with an option to slot in another 8 or so with the latest flash technologies for media storage and application space.
Dual-core CPU's wouldn't necessarily be needed if you're not loading up a monster desktop OS. Just take a look at what Nokia has managed with the N8XX line, which for all its faults is still a damn nice little piece of hardware. It runs Linux, so packaging is a clusterfuck, and at least the N770 takes a while to boot - then runs slowly - but those can be overcome with RAM upgrades.
I rant too much.
Re:You need a bigger computer (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Comfort
2. No disruptions
3. My PC's a screamin' demon
4. No more of those "longest day ever" days. I can take off mid-day, walk over to a terrace for lunch and a pint, and go back to work refreshed and satisfied
5. ???
6. Profit!?
For me, it works great, but I'm a computer nut with no kids, and the wife stays out of my hair. I'm past the stage where games like World of Warcraft could devour my life, and even beyond my job I still do the same kind of work for myself, running a few web sites and servers. Home is as much a "work environment" for me as any other place with a terminal.
Meanwhile my coworkers are family men with bossy wives and 2.4 pre-teens running up the walls, they probably see the office as a sanctuary, an escape from their busy homes. Ironically, I live a few blocks away from the office, everyone else lives way out in the boonies. To be honest, if there weren't an unspoken awkwardness with my fellow coders, I'd forward my office number and work from home almost every day. I would definitely get more stuff done.
All this to say: travel time should not be the primary factor when considering telework.
Are we asking for small, or cheap? Pick one... (Score:5, Interesting)
* About 6lbs.
* Celeron 1.6 single-core with a 533 memory bus.
* 512megs RAM, 80gig SATA, DVD-read, CD-R/RW.
* Intel 945 video.
* PCMCIA slot.
* Atheros WiFi.
This is about the same horsepower as the recent crop of "ultra-lights", with more disk space of course.
I dropped an extra gig in it for cheap and nuked Vista Home Basic immediately for Ubuntu. I'm typing this on it now, with Ubuntu Gutsy. I have full Compiz support although the limited graphics speed seems to limit the "cube" to a two-sided plane (two desktops) with full speed. I also have VirtualBox and Windows XP running perfectly.
I even run whole-disk encryption with TrueCrypt with no noticeable speed penalty.
It's been dropped twice and survived a water-glass spill that nuked the WiFi card but that was a $20 fix. It's been carried *daily*, used hard and runs like a champ still.
This low-budget critter is enough to make anybody re-think the need for anything more potent, if you're running Linux.
I mention all this to establish what performance baseline is really needed today.
I wouldn't trade this critter for anything physically smaller, but then again I'm a big guy and am not bothered by running a sizeable "messenger bag" style laptop case.
Finally, thumbs up to Acer for offering a cheap, tough and useful as hell little critter.
Thumbs down to Micro$loth for fostering a crapware OS on them...
Re:The Appeal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:4 hours commuting a day... (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, yes you can find a reasonable place to live in town on a middle class paycheck. If you don't mind renting forever (median apartment prices are over $900k) and you don't have kids. As soon as you actually care about the schools and neighborhood cultural ideals, acceptable places to live become amazingly scarce. Most of the towns around NYC where the soccer mom lifestyle exists also are priced that $200k a year salary is the entry level. The median housing prices are around $600K and property taxes are high. [lohud.com] So anyone who makes less than the requisite $200K lives farther away, and your don't have to get all that far away for a rush hour commute to take two hours or more. Minutes of your life may be worth more than a few bucks, but your family's standard of living is worth more than a few minutes. This is where the jobs are, so millions of people make the daily trek.
Re:OLPC (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:4 hours commuting a day... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Appeal? (Score:1, Interesting)
Its tiny, silent, and it's faster than the (very) old desktop I had before.
The specs are great for what I use it for. I chucked eeeXubuntu and compiz on it, got various TrueCrypt containers in place for my data, added Amarok (I have a load of music on an 8GB SD card), I plug in a usb-powered scanner to scan my documents, Skype video works, Firefox plus extensions works great, does java and shockwave no problem, I've done some important stuff in OpenOffice Writer, my small Samsung ML-2010 laser printer works straight out the box, KAddressBook has all my contacts, XFCE is customized just how I like it
However, I've found that to use it for any length of time I really do have to plug in my external LCD monitor and usb mouse. I want a USB keyboard as well, for my big old fingers.
The speed and capability is great, but if you connect an external screen/keyboard/mouse it's fantastic.
I don't have a 'real' pc - this is all I have and it does everything I want. The only thing I'll probably need soon is an external cdrom drive for when I next want to rip/burn a new CD. (By the way, I play DVD's on AV equipment, and record TV on a PVR, so don't need any of that from a pc).
By the way, "xrandr" handles dual screens great, and setting up some bash aliases in the terminal for the external screen and truecrypt stuff and whatever you use all the time makes life sweet.
A real-life example. My 2 cents
Dumb Terminal (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, for a home user unless you're gaming or video editing how many computers do you need? For most the answer is one with enough grunt to run a virtual machine for each user. From there is just a question of connecting people to it.
My wife does photo editing with some pretty big images, while at the same time I'm a developer with a VM running MySQL, MS-SQL, IIS and Apache. We each connect to our dedicated VM using RDP on a laptop networked with wifi and if I'm going to sit in one place for more than 30 minutes I plug in a 22" external monitor, USB mouse/keyboard and the laptop just sits next to me. I must admit my wife grumbles a little about the refresh rates, but mostly its quicker than using a medium to high end laptop that would cost quite a bit more.
I don't know about other countries but the price of HSDPA in Australia is actually becoming affordable, with telcos like Three ahref=http://www.three.com.au/rel=url2html-4832 [slashdot.org]http://www.three.com.au/> offering 2GB of data for $29/month. Plug that into a eeePC and SSH tunnel or VPN to your home server (Linux for me) and hey preso, you've now got the performance of your desktop with all the redundancy and backups that you should have at home.
While I'm on my high horse I should also mention the green benefits of extending the life of old laptops using this setup...
Wrong Question!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget the silence and no-maintenance aspect that going completely passively cooled and solid-state affords you. And even in a desktop system all the other issues apart from computing speed become important once you experience the difference.
Such other concerns are the whole raison d'etre of silentpcreview.com. There have been some clever cases designed for silence, but they lack the elegence of a small enclosed box that never needs to have filters cleaned or the worry that a fan will seize at an inopportune time.
With the release of the Intel Atom and the Via Isaiah I suspect that it will be only a matter of time before we get the desktop system with essentially no downside. Which is why I'm waiting for it, because at that point the upgrade cycle will likely be over for me. Maybe there will be a killer app coming along, but we are 4 cores into the parallelization path of more CPU horsepower and I haven't seen it yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Isaiah [wikipedia.org]
Small notebook features (Score:3, Interesting)
1. It is dependable - it boots quickly, runs the full duration of its battery life (2.5-3 Hrs), warns politely when battery is dying with time to recover, and charges up in a couple of hours, even from an inverter plugged in the lighter socket in my car. Quick charging is a real blessing. It draws 25 watts while running AND charging, less if just running!!! Amazing.
2. It is durable, small, and light- No drive means it is not fragile and I don't have to worry whether I will crash the drive. It is amazing how convenient it is to have on hand when needed. Going to a hotspot just means grabbing the little gadget and going in. Less than 1 Kg is hard to beat.
3. Screen is sharp and legible - Though I would like it somewhat bigger and with more resolution, the screen is amazingly sharp and pleasant to read from. Only drawback is that it shows fractional web pages but that is usually a minor problem. The size and form factor of the device make for a very nice "Belly Telly" for watching movies while reclining.
4. USB ports are very useful - I had to edit a resume while out of town, had no printer, went to Wally World and bought a $35 HP deskjet, plugged it in, and printed my resume. No muss, no fuss, no bother. It already had drivers for the printers so it just worked. NICE... 2.5" USB hard drives hold lots of movies for extended trips away from civiilization. USB DVD drive allows viewing DVDs.
5. Wireless has good sensitivity and is amazingly seamless. I go to a hotspot, turn it on, click a couple of times, and am online. No worries whether a windows trojan will be downloaded, and the wireless just works.
6. The screen makes a good bookreader for non DRM (the only kind of Ebooks I consider anyway) books. It is very legible, no fatigue from reading from it, and it has an OK bookreader provided.
7. Great way to download audiobooks from librivox.org or podiobooks.com and then listen to them or transfer them to an SD card for use in an
8. Audio system is credible and it plays most audio formats seamlessly. When SDHC cards grow in capacity, I have considered getting and dedicating one of these gadgets to playing my collection of
9. USB thumb drives are now available in 8+ GB capacity. I use one for temporary movie storage and put a movie or two on the thumb drive to watch and then delete. I just saw 16 GB USB drives so it looks like capacity will be little trouble with this device.
10. The keyboard is too small for long term heavy use but for editing a document and for navigating the Internet it is just fine. Of course, with USB one can plug in a bigger keyboard if needed, and even plug in a VGA display to have a full size machine.
11. Finally, Cost - $400 is a price point nobody else seems to take seriously. In the car market, people see a small car, built with precision and artistry, and decide to compete with a larger more expensive car. Ultimately you get to SUVs when it all plays out. The competitors for the Eee PC seem to be bigger, heavier, more expensive, and maybe marginally more functional but somehow people forgot the original idea.
What price point? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was ecstatic to find a Dell Vostro deal a couple weeks ago where you could get an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 2.0Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, 160GB 7200RPM disk, 15.4" glossy 1680x1050 display, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256MB, 8x DVD dual-layer burner, Intel 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR for around $1000 (USD).
That's a pretty decent machine, for a thousand dollars. It's not an XPS, or an uber-gaming rig, and it's way more than what you need to just browse the web and check your email. But for what I like to do (run virtual machine instances, test out apps, play some recent PC games) it's perfect.
If all you need is web and email access with document and spreadsheet software, the Asus EEE PC and (rapidly arriving) competitors is great. It's small, light, and good enough.
If you want to run memory- or disk- or video-intensive apps, obviously the EEE PC doesn't work for that.
All of us here on Slashdot need to remember that not everyone uses their PC in the same way.