Asus eee901a, upgraded to 2gb RAM. It has the 4gb SSD, and I love it. I could throw the damn thing off a cliff and it would be still be humming happily away. I’m running OpenSUSE on it, so no Windows shenanigans, and a smaller footprint, too. The best part is being able to VNC into my desktop from on the road.
The RAM Limitations were imposed by Microsoft and are imposed by the chipset, not the CPU. (My aspire maxes out at 1.5 Gb) The Atom is a 32-bit processor (rather than 64), has little or no L2 cache, and was a conscious applications of ‘What do we get if we throw away things we don’t strictly need’ vs 'we have to make this X% faster than the predecessor and give it new whizbang features.
What you get is a processor that consumes 12 watts instead of 85, and costs $25 in quantity instead of $400. Rather than cramming more components on a single CPU to make it faster, they crammed more CPUs on each wafer to get the costs down.
In the meantime, Microsoft didn’t want the cheap processor running XP to cannibalize sales of Vista, so they kneecapped it to 1 Gb, but some (most) manufacturers made the machines upgradable to 2 gb.
Why 2Gb? Because the old, well known, cheap, chipset was designed when 2 Gb was considered a crazy amount of memory.
So, part of the limitation is hardware, and part is politics. The end result is one cheap, slow-but-efficient piece of kit.
Love, love my Acer Aspire one. I’m posting from it now. Don’t have a laptop, and rarely use the desk top any more. I would recommend getting at least 2 USB ports. The Acer h
You may want to use a cordless mouse and also your PDA for a modem. And have a port for a memory stick or blue tooth or something. I have never used more than two at at time myself.
Great little machine. Light weight nice keyboard. Oh it has a sim card reader too. Great for quick downloads from your camera. Used it yesterday when a bunch of us got together for a quick get together at the hotel before we parted ways. I could quickly share pictures of the night before, and the machine is nice and small so it did not get in the way.
One of the best buys I’ve made in a long time.
Did I say I Love it?
I’ve always had a desktop computer, but i recently got myself an Asus Eee1005HA-P for portable computing, and i love it.
I got the model with the largest (63Whr) battery capacity, and the battery life is incredible. If i’m doing basic stuff (internet, email, word processing, spreadsheets), i get 8 hours easily on one charge, and usually closer to 10. Obviously high-drain stuff like video reduces that considerably, but even when i watch a movie on Netflix i’ve never had less than about 6 hours on a charge.
I was also really impressed with the keyboard. A friend of mine had one of the first-generation Eee models, and typing was a joke. The newer, 10" models have a really spacious keyboard for such a small computer, and even a ham-fisted typist like me manages fine with it.
The model i bought has the slightly more powerful chip (N280 1.66Ghz, instead of N270 1.6Ghz). To be honest, i’m not sure whether that makes a whole lot of difference; the benchmarks for the two processors aren’t very different at all. As others have said, power and performance is not good enough for this to be your only computer, unless all you do is email, internet, and word processing. Still, i frequently have Thunderbird, Firefox, Word, and Excel open together without any problem at all. You do have to be a bit more frugal in your web browsing; if you’re the sort of person who likes to leave about 20 Firefox tabs open, you’ll probably want to change that habit otherwise a netbook will just grind to a halt.
I wouldn’t run HD video on it, but i’ve watched NetFlix movies and MLB.com streaming video without any real problems. It’s obviously better if you’re not running anything else at the same time, but with the small screen that would be pointless anyway.
Overall, i think it’s excellent. Light, easy to carry around, great battery life, and powerful enough for a second computer. No regrets about the purchase.
Windows XP “sees” and reports the 2 gigs of memory in the XP hardware readout in XP so does the belarc hardware reporter (www.belarc.com) . This claim doesn’t make sense (to me) based on what I’m seeing.
Not only that, but just about every review i’ve read of Atom-equipped netbooks reports better performance after installing more memory.
I guess it’s possible that all those reports are simply wishful thinking, but it seems unlikely.
cite: Microsoft retains 1GB RAM limit on netbooks | TechSpot
ETA: Clarification: There’s a good two dozen netbooks out there. EVERYONE is making them. There were limits placed on them by Microsoft but vendors have been working around them (by putting linux on the netbook, ferinstance)…
Now, find an atom based netbook with MORE than 2 Gb of RAM.
Well, i don’t think anyone ever said that there were netbooks with more than 2Gb.
Also, while your story says that 1Gb is the amount of RAM that “the ‘netbook’ edition of Windows will tolerate,” it seems that the hardware limitations that MS places on netbooks are, for the most part, contractual limitations on the manufacturers, rather than technological limits on the computers themselves. And plenty of people seem to be having success in replacing the 1Gb RAM module with a 2Gb stick, both in terms of Windows XP recognizing the RAM, and in terms of computer performance. As this article says:
The distinction, in many cases, seems to be that, while Asus or Dell or whoever can’t sell you a netbook with 2Gb of RAM, they can sell you a netbook with an accessible RAM compartment, where you can do your own swap.
I’ve read of some cases where people need to mess around with the BIOS to get the larger RAM stick to work, but they can usually manage to get it working.
I’m not sure what the disconnect is. I’ve stated some limitations were due to hardware (true. You cannot expand past 2 Gb) and some were political (true: Microsoft didn’t wish to cannibalize sales of Vista)
You’re agreeing with me, or I’m misunderstanding you.
I think several of us read your statement re MS “kneecapping” the Atom 270 to mean that MS had somehow modified the netbook XP OS so that a 270 CPU could only access 1 gig of RAM regardless of system RAM.
Ah. Well, I’m not Unintentionally Blank for nothin’.
The funny thing is, Windows 7 is supposed to run decently on 'em…Vista won’t.
Course, when I tried running the Release Candidate, it did in fact work, and work well, then the next day fell over as there was only half a gig of storage after the install. That’s my biggest gripe about the Aspire One…the 8 Gb SSD.