I’ve decided that I totally hate Netbooks. This unit is as decked out as you can get it. Big optional hard drive for storage. Lots of RAMs running around. In fact with RAM and HD space, it’s actually just as good as my late Laptop… but that’s where the good points end. The wireless antenna sucks and gives crap for signal strength, even when within feet of a wireless access point. But that’s fine, I can live with that. But what really sucks the most is the little anemic processor.
When I open up one of my books to work on them…. oh… say it’s the one that my publisher is waiting for me to finish editing… I make a change in the document… and everything I type or whatnot takes 5 to 30 seconds to actually change. It’s fine when the document is small, say under 150KB. But when it grows, everything bogs down. Sure, it’s a big hefty book I’ve got going on, but it still. I’d like to actually be able to hammer the wrinkles out and get it to print. That would be nice.
It’s almost June now. Browning will have that X-Bolt rifle to me soon. And then I’ll get a decent machine that I can write, edit, and do more videos on. Hopefully by then, we’ll actually be in warm weather too. I’m looking up at fresh snow in the mountains above Ogre Ranch.
Netbooks are a compromise for small volume and long battery life. They are best used while traveling.
If you want a decent desktop replacement laptop, get a large gaming laptop … they have big screens, go fast, are large and heavy, and eat up battery power like candy.
Yeah, that’s not what I want. I want a potent machine, but in a 14-15″ size that I can still travel with. There are a lot of options for just that sort of machine. As soon as I can get my freaking X-Bolt from Browning, it’s a done deal.
Or a MacBook pro, they are pricey, but it sounds like the X-Bolt rifle is pretty pricey as well. I really like mine, my only complaint is that it doesn’t have bottomless hard disk space, because video takes up lots of room.
A buddy of mine just gave me an ASUS netbook, he replaced the windows and firefox for different versions and it runs like a raped ape, if you want I can get the details and you should be able to fix yours up. The Atom doesn’t like a bunch of extraneous code and BS running apps and this one eliminated those.
I’m running Linux and it runs great. I can stream Hulu and stuff, browse, no problem. But when I open a very large document, like my book, it bogs down like crazy.
I presume that you are not working with one chapter at a time. It is somewhat cumbersome, but it gets it done.
Check out the Dell XPS 15 or 17. Buddy of mine just got one and he loves it. He’s playing Portal 2 at pretty high graphics settings (can’t remember exactly what the settings were), and says it looks and runs great.
You might want to try tuning the swapiness parameter on that netbook, until you can replace it with something better.
For some reason Linux tends to be over agressive in how it makes use of swap space instead of physical RAM and that can make for a big performance hit when you have plenty of RAM but a slowish HD.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What%20is%20swappiness%20and%20how%20do%20I%20change%20it?
I don’t have that problem with my nettie running Win 7. Is yours an older version? I can open hundreds of pages documents without hiccup.
Maybe it’s that linux crap that is holding you back. 🙂