On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 11:59:48 +0000, Ian bell <ianbell@ukfsn.org> wrote:

I have just seen this laptop advertised at Ebuyer for £380 and it is supplied without an OS. What do you think?

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=5306890111&action=c2hv...

Spec looks fine, considering the 1GHz C3 processor, but I'd hope for more than 1.5 hours on the battery. Does the Linux kernel support all the hardware on the motherboard, and does X support the graphics chip? Watch out for the US keyboard! I'm sure you'll let us know how you get on with it if you buy it. Tim.

On Saturday 12 February 2005 11:59 am, Ian bell wrote:

I have just seen this laptop advertised at Ebuyer for £380 and it is supplied without an OS. What do you think?

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=5306890111&action=c2h vd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=84710

IAn

Hmm it's cheap enough but in my experience the C3 Nehemiah is not a very fast chip, it's floating point performance is pretty poor and clock for clock it compares badly to almost every other modern x86 implementation out there. You often find them in MiniITX boards (of which I have had a lot of dealings with) and in my experience you should expect about the same performance as a PIII 500. So with that in mind you could pick up a second hand laptop PIII 500 or higher, get better build quality, more expandability and comparable or better performance. Not to mention that 512MB memory limit (even when throwing away the supplied 256MB), abysmal quoted battery life and annoying US keyboard. Oh and I don't think it includes a PCMCIA slot so you are out of luck if you want to add wireless without resorting to one of those USB adapters. (actually there is another way round that but it's a hardware hack and probably warranty voiding) Sorry that sounds a bit negative overall doesn't it :-)

On Saturday 12 February 2005 1:06 pm, adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:

Given that the Nehemiah cpus aren't that fast I (personally) would be more tempted to look for a secondhand IBM T20/21/22/23 laptop, and it doesn't come with a nipple pointer,

Agreed, once you have owned a Thinkpad the only laptop you may ever want for is a powerbook (and even that is debateable) The only thinkpad buying tip is avoid the i series units like the plague (they are Acer built back when Acer didn't so much build machines, they just put all the bits in a box and rattled it until it worked) Acer are much better now and the i series was depreciated some time ago, honesty I doubt you will come across many on the 2nd hand market as most of them are probably broken by now. :-) IBM have just announced that they are going to oursource Thinkpad's again, I hope it works out better this time.

I don't think it can be beaten on price but I think it will almost certainly be lacking a bit in overall quality.

Just checked my price lists and I can come nowhere near that price, even on the cheapest machine I offer, So yes it is cheap but as Adam suggests probably cheap as in nasty.

On Saturday 12 February 2005 7:32 pm, Brett Parker wrote:

Acer are much better now? Hrm, not convinced, they still have very broken DSDT tables. I can't for instance get the battery status out of my laptop in linux due to the DSDT table not declaring where Z005 should go, which is nice. Also, the warrenty repairs take forever to actually happen, with a consistent claiming of "We're waiting on parts".

(Otherwise, I'm very happy with my Acer Aspire 1513LMi, hug that amd64 goodness ;)

A fair point but then I have yet to see any laptop with a fully functional ACPI implementation, the general method seems to be bugger the ACPI spec and implement just enough to get the thing working in Windows. The Warranty thing is sad though, reminds me of my business partners Vaio

On Saturday 12 February 2005 10:41 pm, Brett Parker wrote:

A lot of the problems are caused by people using microsofts DSDT compiler, which does absoultely no bloody error checking, and lets you shoot yourself in the foot lots...

Ahhh now there's a thing, A Microsoft product that allows you to paint yourself into a corner....who'd have thunk

Vaio, as in the makers of over-priced tat that falls apart if you sneeze about 6 miles away from it? :)

It's a shame really, I really like their TV's (and I used to fix them for a living so I should know), they seem to know a bit about game consoles and as a format I liked minidisc (although the draconian DRM ruined it) How could they get the computers so wrong ? (although to be fair the current line of Viao's do have totally amazing screens, I've never seen a TFT do real black like that before)