Rik's Blog

Yeah, Yeah, I know I promised to be more active (it's been more than 6weeks ) and that I'd come back with more tips on getting moblin just right.

However, I've sold the eeePC onwards. Why?
Well, to be honest it was just too many compromises. Yes it was great to have a small PC that I could just pop into the luggage and take with me. It could just about do Youtube videos, but in general the graphics (GMA945) is terrible. No acceleration of anything, so you have to rely on the Atom processor (an N270). Which then shows up the Atom for what it is - not quite there yet. That coupled with this ridiculous notion of only small screen resolutions on netbooks (Intel's definition apparently) meant I was constantly frustrated with scrolling in a 1024x600 screen. Anytime I did anything other than browse or IM the app wouldn't fit on the screen res!! So I decided it's time to look around and see what I could get in laptop form that would be resonable priced, portable and have enough grunt to do my normal activities..

I did some searching, and initially I went down the nettop route again looking at new eeePCs (the T91MT 9" and T101MT 10" tablets looked nice), the Viliv S10 and others. but there was so many gotcha's. Most had the same silly restriction on the 10" screen - i.e. 1024x600, or if you wanted more than 11" screens were the requirement. Dell do a 10" screen with 1388x768 but it's expensive and it's a Dell - nothing against them, but I've never found them reliable and have shunned them for many years now - that's just my prefernce.

I digress... back to the 11" screens. If I'm to have a 11" screen, why would I want an atom based netbook. At this size we're starting to reach into laptop territory - so I decided to look around and came up with the Samsung X120. This looked perfect. Only downside was battery life - trustedreviews only got 2.5hrs out of it!!! So back to the drawing board...

Finally I zoned in on this, the Acer Aspire 1810tz. For me, it was a perfect match for what I wanted. Small device, good screen res, and decent CPU and the price --- I got it delivered for €540. Cheaper than all the other options (including the netbooks) I was looking at.

So what's it like...

First off, battery life. It truly is brilliant. I charged up about 2 days ago, and still using it with on average about 3-4hrs a day.. Looks like I will need to charge in the next hour - but I reckon it'll be just over 8hrs. Pretty good on a new battery.

The screen is lovely - crystal clear and easy to work with. Couple that with the GMA X4500MHD graphics means I can watch 720p movies with very little CPU utilisation freeing up my nice CULV pentium cores (2 of them) for other tasks. Have streamed a few movies off my media server, and it works very well.

The keyboard takes a little getting used to. They keys feel a little bigger than I'm used to - not just coming from a 9" netbook, but also smaller than my normal desktop keyboards. Other than that, it perfectly reasonable to type with - hence a nice long blog post

It came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit pre installed. Using Windows 7 already on other machines and it works very well. Lots of trial apps installed, so will need to remove them all. Looks like MS Works is installed along with Office 2007 trial. I like neither so both will be coming off pretty soon.

Build quality is good. Feels as sturdy as my eeepc 900A, and as good as my work laptop Lenovo T61. My only concern is the screen hinges do look a little flaky. But I've seen them on Aspires for a while so am hoping it's just a visual thing.

Now - the downsides...

The UK/Ireland model doesn't have bluetooth built in. I knew this when buying it and isn't a cause for concern. Some countries do have it, but is definitely not on this. I looked inside (under the memory flap) and it's got 2 spots for mini-pcie cards, with just one connector populated on the board for a half size card in which is the Intel Wifi 1000BGN card. So am guessing to easy way to retrofit the bluetooth back in just yet.

The second downside is that wifi card. It's just a 2.4MHz wifi card, so you do get 11n, but not 5Ghz. A pity, but I can live with it for now. Must investigate if that other PCIe socket could be populated and fit a proper card.

No real issues to report... Out of the box it worked well. The battery takes a long time to fill up from empty (surprising long actually) and the eRecovery tool to create the recovery CDs gives an error on the 3rd DVD - contacting Acer support to see if there's a work around for it.

Overall though - Highly recommended if you want something light and portable. Much better than any of the netbooks I've seen, and believe me you won't miss moving from 9" netbook to 11" laptop

Finally, just a note on Atom. You may feel I'm really coming down on it. Well, yes I am. Main issue is the reluctance of Intel to mary a nice low power CPU with a decent graphics chip. At least in the Z520 they started, but again crippled the whole thing by limiting the resolution of screens. Not sure how Dell is getting away with their high res screens - but from what I can see they are among the few (possibly HP have one too ).

I'm not convinced by the newer pineview device either. The Grfx core on those have (IMHO) gone backwards with only MPEG2 accelerated decode - no MPEG4 that was in the Z5xx devices. ION is the better job, but netbooks are only starting to surface now, and with pineview devices out there the future of ION is uncertain. That coupled with the prices of these devices continuing to keep pushing up.

A quick survey of many online stores shows netbook prices are now in the €250-€450 mark and climbing. That is nuts. €250 - yes good price. €450, I prefer spending the extra and getting something that is useful for more than just browsing..