A new toy...

[andruoid]

Just yesterday I picked up an Acer AO722-BZ825 (long name, small price!) for $329 CDN. I wanted something smaller than my recently acquired Acer 15.6". Besides, my wife is now at school so she has the latter system ...ok, a valid excuse to get a new system!

The 722 is a really sweet netbook. 11.6" 1366x768 screen, AMD C-50 (which kills any Atom out there, especially in video), 2GB RAM, 250GB standard 5400RPM drive, BT 3.0, Wireless N, GB ethernet, HDMI port, Win7 Home Premium 64bit, 6 cell batt. and hardware virtualization support (AMD-V).

The HDD is the slow part of the system so after I backed up the OS Recovery to my external drive I then installed my Seagate Momentus XT hybrid which is 7200RPM, 32MB cache and a has a 4GB SLD NAND chip. When this drive was in the other laptop it got rather warm even when it was under average load. After intensive use in the 722 it creates almost no heat.

2GB RAM is not bad, I could get a single 4GB I see no need for now. Chrome with 8 tabs, 4 apps in the startup menu, 76 processes total I'm only at about 1GB. Once my course is over in 2-3 months I'll be replacing Win7 with Trisquel which uses about 300MB RAM on startup. The need for Silverlight is hindering my ability to wipe Win7 atm.

Battery life is excellent. After watching online labsims for about 3.5 - 4 hrs and surfing in between (basically wifi on the entire time) I was up for about 5.5 hrs. On my previous other laptop I got 2.5 if I was lucky.

Highly recommended if you want something small/portable and fully capable of running just about anything out there.

 

[johnlgalt]

nice....

 

[SUroot]

Just use VMware player from within Linux.... Seriously... Just take an image using whatever backup software (Norton, Acronis) mount the software and image in the player and deploy it to a virtual machine within VMware. It will be your exact laptop OS as is, virtualised as a guest on your Linux host. Best of both worlds.

 

[9to5cynic]

Smokes my netbook. Video sucks on my atom, especially recently. And the 11in screen is probably even nicer, the ten just doesn't quite cut it. Hows your battery life? With XP I was getting the advertised ten hours on mine.

 

[andruoid]

9to5, 10" is a little small but it's mainly the resolution on the standard netbooks I don't like: 1024x600 is just too tight a view. 1366x768 on a 11.6 is really comfortable, for me.

Battery life is beyond what I was expecting. After the first full charge i got 5.5 hours of life. Almost 4 hrs of that were silverlight based lab sims (video streaming) and the rest was surfing, installing the rest of my apps, etc. Today that has increased by about another 30mins under similar loads. The docs say 9.5 hrs but that probably is light duty; reading, word processing, etc.

SUroot, I know I complain a lot about silverlight but I really can't run linux just yet, even in a vm. Along with silverlight it won't be too long now before I'm into my Win 2008 RC2 Adv. course. This will require IE9 as well due to even more MS compatilbity sims and software. Home Premium will have to do.

edit: got a 4GB stick of RAM today, much better

 

[SUroot]

I did mean run linux, then install vmware and run windows in the VM. Other than the Silverlight, what else stops you?

 

[andruoid]

On the previous laptop I installed linux and then tried running Windows 7 Pro (OEM) in both VBox and VMware, just didn't like it. I'm tempted to try it again with this new laptop, but its the time it takes. Linux will install np, but if the vm fails like before, I have to reload everything again.

 

[9to5cynic]

Yeah, 1024x600 is too small. I think the next laptop I buy will have to be a full laptop again, definitely notice the limitations of my netbook.

But, a netbook is the perfect device to install linux on, and then install a different distro, and just keep doing this every few months. I've only royally screwed up grub once. (And I am blaming Grub2 for that... )

--

Personally (obviously) I'd install Linux on it, and just do an image from your current windows onto it in a VM. That sounds like a plan to me! Best of both worlds. Windows when you need it. Linux for fun and real work.

 

[starxpilot]

I hate you. Getting a shiny toy...me want!

 

[andruoid]

I hate you. Getting a shiny toy...me want!

Hate is pretty strong, how about dislike intensely instead? ;-) ...I can virtually share the toy if you want

 

[SUroot]

Yeah, 1024x600 is too small. I think the next laptop I buy will have to be a full laptop again, definitely notice the limitations of my netbook.

But, a netbook is the perfect device to install linux on, and then install a different distro, and just keep doing this every few months. I've only royally screwed up grub once. (And I am blaming Grub2 for that... )

--

Personally (obviously) I'd install Linux on it, and just do an image from your current windows onto it in a VM. That sounds like a plan to me! Best of both worlds. Windows when you need it. Linux for fun and real work.

Yeah and if it doesn't work, that same image will restore your laptop to windows

 

[andruoid]

Well, not a fan of the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid anymore. It was acting up a bit, thought it was the RAM I upgraded too. In a previous post I explained I went through 3 different brands while trying to diagnose the issue. Turns out it was the XT HDD. Throughout its history the different firmware updates have fixed one thing and introduced another. Mine came with the SD26 version 2 months ago. I started getting BSoD so after the RAM issue i tried flashing the new SD28 version. Now I get a subtle but constant "whiring" noise. I emailed Seagate and posted on their forum and waiting for a reply. I'd flashback to SD26 but Seagate does not provide this ability nor do they have documentation on there site as to what these firmware updates do.

Meanwhile NCIX has a sale on SSDs, specifically, the OCZ Vertex Plus 120GB ...I pick it up in a couple of hours The Seagate will be demoted to external usage.

 

[andruoid]

7.5 hrs on a full charge with the SSD under moderate load. Who needs a tablet? ;-)

 

[andruoid]

Meh, the OCZ Plus died within a week. After some research the Plus series seems to have many issues. For a few dollars more I picked up an Intel 320 80GB which has the best reliability rating (as far as I know). On the WEI (Windows Experience Index) the Intel 320 gets a 7.5 and Windows boots in 18 secs