Dr Deviant

A buddy of mine sent me this link, presumably knowing I’d have something to say

Bless old Harry Wallop in Las Vegas… my assumption is that he is American.

Harry starts off with quite a good expose on the Consumer Electronics Show but then starts stuffing it up with some rather non-technical stuff-ups. The best of which is that the new £99 Elonex will have 2 GB of memory – a mere thirteenth that of full blown laptops. Errm… carry the one… minus… errr… a full blown laptop has 26 GB of RAM? Where the hell is he living? My 64 bit, quad core beast only has 8GB… General use Windows XP can only use 3GB. Assuming he means ’solid state disk replacement’, then When is he living? Full blown laptops today have 350GB hard drives… even the cheap ones (£250) start at about 80GB…

All-in-all I’m not sure I trust Mr Wallop’s reporting.

I thought I did my own article on netbooks, maybe my search engine isn’t working as well as it shoud? ah well, this is no time to not be giving you my opinion now is it.

There is a trade-off with the sub-notebook sized machines and here is a summary:

• The size means harder to use by a fully grown adult with failing vision and fingers like sausages.
• Horsepower is not really available because of the lack of cooling ability and airflow.
• The massively extended battery life means there are fewer moving parts – disk space is limited for the most part.

So what can you do with them… well, here is what you can’t

• If you need to install Microsoft Office suite, don’t get a netbook.
• If you need to install backup software, don’t get a netbook.
• If you need to install anti-virus software, don’t get a netbook.
• If you want to use Photoshop, don’t get a netbook.
• If you want to dictate meeting minutes, don’t get a netbook unless you have iddy-biddy fingers and telephoto zoom vision… or an external monitor and keyboard… oh, wait, that’s not the point… don’t get a netbook.

So what is the point? Here are a few.

• They are generally ultra quiet meaning you can surf for porn in the front room while your missus watches coronation street.
• They generally have a superb battery life meaning you can even survive the Sunday omnibus of coronation street.
• They generally run a whole lot cooler meaning that if you do accidentally fap your tangle onto one, your chap won’t get second degree burns round the head.
• They can be tiny meaning that if your sister walks in on you, you can stuff it in your trousers with your tok-a-losh in one swish movement (this does take some practice though)

I recently came back from holiday in Africa where I put my Asus Eee 900 in the spare wheel well for 3 weeks while off-roading. When called upon the device worked perfectly… I would so not have done that with my work laptop. As a support guy, these things mean that you can have a relatively active social life yet still have the tools to access most modern support systems if you need to.

Netbooks will never replace ‘real’ computers where any kind of processing power is concerned, and major business will not suddenly drop Dell, IBM and Lenovo. However given the potential saving in the cost of ownership and the prevalence of software tools like ‘PC anywhere’, it is not that hard to imagine that smaller companies may start buying a few more powerful computers for in the office and share out the power over dumb terminal style netbooks. It’s not that far off to imagine that larger companies may start suggesting to vendors that new software runs on these things. Put the horsepower where it is needed.

The more immediate consequense is that the price of intermediate and entry level PC’s will fall, and this is good for the consumer.

In my opinion the MSI wind based systems are very good value and a great compromise on screen and keyboard size. One of the better ones in the UK at the moment is the Advent 4213. I hate myself for saying that PC world stock is good, but this one genuinely is. This edition even has a mobile broadband SIM slot built in, and they are currently (at the time of writing!) selling them as a web exclusive price of £249.99.