Eugene Fischer

Tag: netbook

New Computer, New Desktop

As my Asus Eee netbook committed the kind of suicide that fills the room with the smell of burning plastic, I’ve switched to an 11-inch MacBook Air for on-the-go computing. My background on the Asus was an image from  Shaun Tan’s Tales Of Outer Suburbia, made available by Tor.com when he was nominated for the Best Artist Hugo award. It’s a lovely image, but new hardware and a new OS require a new decor. Tan’s drawing was intricately detailed and busy, so for the new laptop I’ve chosen something minimal and clean: the poster from my favorite movie, set against a matching background. (Finding images to use that don’t require background fills is a bit tricky; the 11-in. Air has a 1366 x 768 screen.)

Click to see full-size

So thats my desktop.  Anyone else want to show theirs?

Night of the Long Screwdrivers

I woke up to discover a brutal scene in my dining room.

Only two days after I acquired my 11″ MacBook Air, it has eliminated all possible threats to its power by savaging the only other ultraportable laptop in the apartment.  The smaller, plastic-bodied Asus Eee 1000HE — already weakened by a year of battering and no longer able to reliably power up — never stood a chance.

The Eee served me well for a while, but as you can see there is no point in getting sentimental.  Pieces of the Eee will live on; I will get an enclosure for the hard drive and use it as an on-the-go backup disk, and that lonely gig of memory will find its way into something.  The rest will be recycled or sold as replacement parts for Eees of greater fitness.

And What About The Tiny Computer?

The tiny computer in the trio was a Dell Mini 9, which I got for free from a friend who also got it for free.  (He was the head of IT for a local construction company, and for a while was a high volume Dell customer.  They were apparently handing out base system (4gig SSD, 512 RAM) netbooks as samples.)  It would be nice if I could use it for work, but unfortunately it has a keyboard with a nonstandard layout.  The quotes key is below the period key, and the top row of letters is not offset from the middle row.  So no easy typing.  But since I can’t use it for work, that frees me up to use if for fun experimental stuff.  I did this to it:

The little guy is now a hackintosh.  To make this work I had to get an SSD big enough to hold OS X, so I picked up a 16 gig for $60.  I also used a lot of information (not to mention a few different bootloaders) found on the mydellmini.com forum.

Samsung N310 (Go)

In that picture of two computers ganging up on another, smaller computer, the one in the middle is a Samsung N310, marketed in the US as the Samsung Go.  It’s an Intel Atom based netbook with 1 gig of RAM, a 160 gig hard drive, and some very nice industrial design.  A long time Apple customer, I’m kind of a sucker for a pretty product.

Samsung1Samsung2

It has rounded clamshell design with an easy to grip rubberized plastic case.  The keyboard is 93% standard size with textured, island keys.  The display is edge to edge glass, like the current Macbook line has, making it supremely easy to clean.  Physically, it is a lovely machine and would be a pleasure to use if I were willing to run the operating system it comes with and is configured for, Windows XP.  Unfortunately, I’m not.

The N310 did not want to play nice with Ubuntu Linux.  The biggest problem was, I suspect, with the power management software.  If I left the unit plugged in and set up not to go into suspend or hibernate mode, then it worked fine.  But, of course, that’s not what a netbook is for.  On battery, or whenever it went through suspend/resume cycles, hardware support became very spotty, and I got frequent disk I/O errors that necessitated rebooting.  Additionally, the screen brightness controls were eccentric to the point of being unusable, and the open source drivers for the Atheros wifi card never reported better than 60% signal strength on the occasions when they worked at all.  A power user might know enough to implement workarounds for these quirks, but I couldn’t figure out any fixes, nor find any in the community support fora.  There are enough equivalent, better supported units that I finally decided I didn’t want to bother with it anymore, I wanted a computer that would let me get work done.

I reiterate, none of these problems were there under Windows XP, so if that is a usable operating system for you then the Samsung N310 is a very, very nice unit (albeit not for people who want to mess with the internals of their computer; the case is hostile to tampering).  But for me Windows itself is a problem, and so my N310 is on its way back to where it came from.