Netbook/laptop "power" dock?

[dragos240]

Hi,

I go to 2 houses, my parents are divorced. I get about equal time for each of them. I have a desktop at one, and a netbook at the other. The desktop has lots of power, more ram, and has a much better gfx card. These are things I can't do with my netbook. Is there a "Power" dock that I can dock my netbook into that will give it more power while plugged in? Like an external processor or something? Graphics power is another issue. Anyone know of such a dock?

Regards,
Dragos240

[dragos240]

Anyone? Anyone?

[juancarlospaco]

Yes, its name is NxNoMachine or FreeNX.
just think...
;)

[snova]

I have a desktop at one, and a netbook at the other. The desktop has lots of power, more ram, and has a much better gfx card. These are things I can't do with my netbook. Is there a "Power" dock that I can dock my netbook into that will give it more power while plugged in? Like an external processor or something? Graphics power is another issue. Anyone know of such a dock?

It would be far too impractical, so I seriously doubt it exists. I would just say "no", but technically there's no reason it could not be done...

As to external processors, how do you think it would plug in? CPU's are interconnected in such a way that they can exchange data at incredible speeds (think gigabytes per second, though I don't think throughput is the objective so much as extremely low latency); you can't exactly get this with USB. A decent graphics card would have a similar issue- you simply can't push enough data through most peripheral interconnects fast enough to make them useful. I think there are standards for external PCI devices, but I don't think anyone has even considered building something like this.

So, no. The closest thing to actually solving your problem is logging in remotely, but you'd have to have an extremely good connection to do anything remotely graphical. (Plus sufficient graphics capability on the client to quickly update the display- something like playing a fullscreen movie at 60fps, I guess.)

[dragos240]

Yes, its name is NxNoMachine or FreeNX.
just think...
;)
:roll:

[tubezninja]

The limitations of netbooks are inbuilt: expandability is limited by design, even moreso that traditional laptops. They're meant to be cheap, small, throwaway machines. Nothing more.

If your netbook has a GMA950, you could try GMABooster (http://www.gmabooster.com/) to eek out a little more kick from the GPU.

On a more cynical note: maybe you could guilt-trip the parent where you have your netbook to get you something a little more capable. ;)

[dragos240]

It would be far too impractical, so I seriously doubt it exists. I would just say "no", but technically there's no reason it could not be done...

As to external processors, how do you think it would plug in? CPU's are interconnected in such a way that they can exchange data at incredible speeds (think gigabytes per second, though I don't think throughput is the objective so much as extremely low latency); you can't exactly get this with USB. A decent graphics card would have a similar issue- you simply can't push enough data through most peripheral interconnects fast enough to make them useful. I think there are standards for external PCI devices, but I don't think anyone has even considered building something like this.

So, no. The closest thing to actually solving your problem is logging in remotely, but you'd have to have an extremely good connection to do anything remotely graphical. (Plus sufficient graphics capability on the client to quickly update the display- something like playing a fullscreen movie at 60fps, I guess.)

Heh, that stinks. I guess I should be looking into a desktop.