On 6 Sep 2008, at 19:47, Dilwyn Jones wrote:
From what you've said, it seems that the cheaper systems aren't
much good
for regular use.
What about someone like me who has an occasional need for a portable
QL away from home, where weight and small size might be important?
Or would I be better off (even for occasional light use) to save my
pennies and wait until I can afford a more expensive machine?
Or would you go as far as to say that I'd be better off with a
traditional laptop PC?
The Acer is £199 with 8GB and £229 with 120GB. It's 1024 x 600, 1.6GHz
and fully capable of running Windows XP or various flavours of Linux.
What I'm saying is that for the saving for the very cheapest machines
- £169 for the Maplin, or the Eee 701 - the Acer represents the
genuinely lowest price point you will get something useful at. The 800
x 480 screen on the 701 is limiting for modern web browsing (though I
reckon it would be fine for an emulated QL environment; it looked
fantastic running Atari 800 emulators), the Maplin's insanely limited
CPU (not just performance, but third-party support) - for the sake of
a £40 saving? Not worth it. Likewise, if you wanted to add a memory
card, the Acer has an SD card slot to expand the built in storage AND
a memory card reader; and buying SD cards for the Maplin to go from
2GB to 8GB would eat up a reasonable amount of the cost saving too.
The instant you cross into the £300 needed for the MSI Wind or
upmarket Eee models, then you can get a dual core 13" laptop from
Currys or elsewhere for £280ish. Unless you REALLY want the tiny form
factor, it's not worth the effort.
I certainly don't think you should save your pennies if all you want
is occasional light use and are already interested in this class of
machine; I just think you should not spend more than £200 (I count the
extra £29 for the 120GB version of the Acer as "a very cheap extra
memory card I'd have bought anyway" - it's less than I paid for the no-
name brand 16GB SDHC card I use) and should get the absolute best
specification you can for that money. The Elonex One - the mooted £100
laptop - is more interesting as the One+ with 256MB RAM and 2GB SSD,
but it's still 800 x 480, 300MHz weird 'barely supported' CPU, and in
that form costs £119. Another few quid for a decent capacity SD card,
and you're into 1.6GHz Atom territory.
Commodore "brand" have just announced one, too. It's £325, which is
already insane given the current marketplace, and uses of all things
the VIA C7-M CPU, which is basically a Cyrix. Anyone who remembers
Cyrix back in the Pentium days will already have shudders running down
their spines, but the truth is, the C7-M is chosen for battery life;
Intel have leapfrogged them AND don't need to cripple the CPU's
performance to do it.
Richard
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