Category: Geeks r Us
Hay all.
The time has come again, i've disided to waist some money on a portable and this time, i've been looking at netbooks.
The standard cpu seems to be the intel atom n270, but the amount of l2 cache that this has (512) seems quite small.
I'm wondering if anyone has run a screenreader on this and if so, how has it coped?
To put things in contrast, I have just completed work on a laptop with a rather old 1.4 ghz which reports 2048 k of l2.
I kno there are obviously other bottle necs that should be considered, but at the end of the day, you can get a faster drive and more ram, but the fact still remains that the cpu needs to be able to cut it.
Cheers.
I hope someone answers this topic soon. I'm very interested myself! It didn't occur to me that this processor wouldn't be enough to run a screen reader.
It works just fine.
I've set 3 of the asus units up for clients, and I've personally been running the asus Netbook since mid July.
The only major thing I've noticed is that jaws is a little sluggish on start up but once that's taken care of, it runs quite well for such a little machine. The other modification I made was upgrading my ram from 1GB to 2. I've actually used this machine to run several tandem sessions for script writing or for testing, with no problems whatsoever!
I haven't tried jaws, but I have tried NVDA from a memory stick and it seems to work fine.
tried jaws on a dell Mini and it worked fine. the thing that sucks about the mini is there are no function keys. they remapped the function keys to the home row with another key using to activate them.
I just read an article in pc magazine, that says to be patient; a faster netbook will be coming next year.
I don't think the decision to buy or not to buy a netbook should be based very heavily at all on processor speed. The current crop of netbooks will handle every day tasks just fine. These include running a screen reader, browsing the web, checking email, listening to media files, etc. If the purposes above are your main reasons for getting the machine, then a netbook could be a good choice.
To me, items that are of more concern than processor speed include quality of the keyboard and battery life. A qwerty can only be compressed to a certain point and still be comfortable for prolonged typing. I have heard from several sources that the HP has the best keyboard of the lot, but none of these units have really impressed me yet in terms of battery life.
Al
I want to think I read somewhere, that one of the acer models has a shortcut key for turning off the screen. That is a feature I'd use often.
the asus eeepc 1000h has a dedicated button for that. i love that pc!!!! it has a 4 hr battery life. jaws runs fine on it. it has a 160 gb harddrive and a gig of ram and the adam n270 processor.
So a 4 hour battery life, what size of battery is that? I noticed one of the acer aspire ones has a 6 cell battery. This blue me away! Isn't that a large bat for a netbook?
Update: I got a samsung nc10 and I love it:
Very light and compact
Keyboard is 93% the size of a normal laptop keyboard - think its the largeist netbook keyboard out.
Build in mic, bluetooth and webcam
I can turn the screen off
Even with everything turned on I get around 6 hours battery life
Its fairly easy to take apart
The atom 1.6 seems to handle everything well enough although the supernova startup even after heverly tweaking it isn't as fast as I would like.
I'm sure you can get the same spec on other netbooks, perhaps even better, (1.6, 1gb 667 160 gb 5400) but at the end of the day, it stands out due to battery life, general sexyness and the keyboard.
@7: What exactly is the most important thing that you would be looking for when purchasing a computer? For example, if one of the early eeepc's that contained a celeron 900 had a slightly bigger keyboard than one of the netbooks with the atom, would you go for that one?
Personally, i'd only be willing to let around 200 mhz of power go in return for a slightly bigger keyboard along with a gig of ram, but i'd just purchase the ram again so really I wouldn't be loosing any memory.
Any nc10 questions, i'll be happy to help.
does the NC10 allow for aa ram upgrade to 2GB?
Yes, but you have to remove the 1gb and put a 2gb stick in due to there only being one slot.
wonder if you could put 2gigs in a dell mini 12. It comes with 1 gig, that's just crap for a computer like that, even with xp home. The reviews are that they sell it with Vista and it's major slow! What about the mini running Ubuntu Linux Operating System doesn't that come with a built in screenreader?
i looked at the sampsung but i jumped the gun a little on the eepc 1000h. i don't regret it though. i'm glad i got rid of that damn 900. that thing was slow. the ssd didn't help matters much as well. luckily i sold the 900 for 200 bucks and just the hell with it and bought the 1000h. ok, has anyone done a reformat of xp with the floppy and the winnt.sif? i would like to do it but i need to invest in a dvd drive that is usb first. or can you nlite it? i have not checked out the support dvd yet. thanks guys :).
@15, with out meaning to be rude, that made very little sence, nlite won't do anything at all to make xp install with out a cd drive.
On top of this, unless i'm the odd one out, I really don't kno anyone that puts there answer file on a floppy anymore, I just have mine on the cd.
As far as my nc10 goes, I just booted from a old drive that I caddied up, google multiboot10.cmd for info on how to do this correctly.
Will respond to 14 once I'm awake enough to look at the spec for the mini.
haven't managed to find the NC10 with SSD option, are you aware of any future plans to release the samsung nc10 with SSD?
I don't think there are any plans to do this to be honest; the next revision of the nc10 is roomered to have inbuilt 3g but noones made any mension of a ssd.
http://www.laptopmag.com/advice/how-to/nc10-hard-drive.aspx
The above is a guide on removing the harddrive of the nc10 - its quite dooable, whilst I haven't done it my self due to there being no need, the instructions seem simple enough if you really want ssd.
On the 5400 rpm drive, my boot time is 28 seconds excluding the supernova lode time, so if it wasn't for supernova, the boot time would actually be very good imo.
People go whild over ssd's, but if you don't want to spend a arm and a leg, the only advantage that you get is quieter operation and smaller seek times. For example, acers netbook includes a 8gb ssd and it is for this reason that linux is bundled with it, the drive is complete crap and according to reviews is one of the worst rated ssd's that exists.
If your hell bent on having a ssd then tbh, there are probably netbooks that would fit your needs better than the nc10.