decoherence
November 10th, 2009, 12:51 AM
I just got an HP 311, an Ion-powered NetBook. Aside from having a half-decent graphics chip, the display resolution is a fairly comfortable 1366x768 and the keyboard is pretty nice. Takes a bit of getting used to, much like the keys on the MacBooks, but once I got used to it I'm able to type at full speed.
After tax and shipping, the system was just under $500 Canadian from Amazon. And of course, it ships with Windows. XP, in this case.
Because this is a Canadian multi-lingual model (french or english) I had to pick one when it first started. I picked English, being fairly sucky at French, put in the other information it wanted and less than ten minutes later I was logged in to a fairly stock XP desktop. God what an ugly theme, but I digress. I did some typing and found that I had some wacky keymap. Evidently this is the standard multi-lingual Canadian keymap. Switched it to US, thankyouverymuch. Do any Canadians actually use that keymap? Why would we want easy access to a British pound symbol, anyway? Ah, I digress yet again.
One hugely annoying thing is that, by default, the trackpad is set to "tap-to-click." On such a small computer, it is only a matter of time before an errant thumb brushes the trackpad and moves your cursor two paragraphs up. Fixed that, thankyouverymuch.
Anyway, you might be wondering what my Linux plans are for this currently XP desktop. I'll be putting Karmic on it, for sure, but first I'm downloading my main vice (WoW) to see how it runs with the Ion hardware.
I'm very happy with how cool and quiet it is, though we'll see how it does with WoW running.
I'll post a 'part 2' comparing its performance to that of the other computers I have run WoW on (a PowerPC Mac and via WINE on an older Athlon.) Don't expect huge numbers, but as long as it can beat out the Mac and WINE, I'll be pleased.
Then I'll post a 'part 3' once I have Ubuntu on it. I imagine that'll be the 'meat.'
Thanks for reading!
After tax and shipping, the system was just under $500 Canadian from Amazon. And of course, it ships with Windows. XP, in this case.
Because this is a Canadian multi-lingual model (french or english) I had to pick one when it first started. I picked English, being fairly sucky at French, put in the other information it wanted and less than ten minutes later I was logged in to a fairly stock XP desktop. God what an ugly theme, but I digress. I did some typing and found that I had some wacky keymap. Evidently this is the standard multi-lingual Canadian keymap. Switched it to US, thankyouverymuch. Do any Canadians actually use that keymap? Why would we want easy access to a British pound symbol, anyway? Ah, I digress yet again.
One hugely annoying thing is that, by default, the trackpad is set to "tap-to-click." On such a small computer, it is only a matter of time before an errant thumb brushes the trackpad and moves your cursor two paragraphs up. Fixed that, thankyouverymuch.
Anyway, you might be wondering what my Linux plans are for this currently XP desktop. I'll be putting Karmic on it, for sure, but first I'm downloading my main vice (WoW) to see how it runs with the Ion hardware.
I'm very happy with how cool and quiet it is, though we'll see how it does with WoW running.
I'll post a 'part 2' comparing its performance to that of the other computers I have run WoW on (a PowerPC Mac and via WINE on an older Athlon.) Don't expect huge numbers, but as long as it can beat out the Mac and WINE, I'll be pleased.
Then I'll post a 'part 3' once I have Ubuntu on it. I imagine that'll be the 'meat.'
Thanks for reading!