The Netbook Is Too Damn Slow

My HP Mini 311 now freezes whenever it has a hard drive in it. Oh well.

So, I need a replacement. What I’d like is something like a netbook - where the dominant factor for me is 1) long battery life, 2) long battery life, and 3) long battery life, except not so fucking slow.

God almighty, it took an eternity to boot, and it wasn’t really fast enough to support the 2d rendering calculations for remote desktoping into it either. The ION 3d chipset didn’t really give you much because the CPU was so slow.

What’s the battery life vs. performance tradeoffs in mobile currently? Cost isn’t a major concern.

Mac. It literally hurts me to say it, but if cost is of no concern and your primary worry is battery life followed by performance, Apple’s integrated battery, non-operable designs are basically perfect. They allow for absolutely massive batteries to be installed in pretty small PCs, and with BootCamp, you can run a decent OS on the thing to boot.

Graphics capabilities won’t be cutting edge (CPU might not either) without getting into nearly astronomical figures, but a mid-range system won’t break many Qt3ers banks (you damnable well-paid IT people, you).

I’m not sure if I can swallow my bile for all things Apple no matter how tasty the candy. What’s the next step down?

Alienware m11x. I can get 6-7 hours out of the battery even with the processor overclocked and the screen at 100% brightness.

Lies. Or at least - unintentionally misleading.

From apple.com:
30Wh battery in the 11"
50Wh battery in the 13"

Alienware M11x has a 63Wh battery.

Apple does an exceptional job of power management in OSX. They may also have better hardware power use by, for instance making sure the MB chipset et al are optimised as much as possible.

But their non-replaceable battery form factor, while it might allow them to fit in a larger than normal battery, does not result in them doing so. They have used that advantage to instead make the overall volume of the package smaller.

Like so:

M11x: System Dimensions
Height: 32.7mm (1.29 inches)
Width: 285.7mm (11.25 inches)
Depth: 233.3mm (9.19 inches)
Starting at Weight: 2.0 kg (4.4lbs)

Macbook Air 11":
Height:0.11-0.68 inch (0.3-1.7 cm)
Width:11.8 inches (29.95 cm)
Depth:7.56 inches (19.2 cm)
Weight:2.3 pounds (1.06 kg)

The Macbook Air is HALF the mass, half the thickness, and an inch and a half less deep. It’s also lower powered, natch, using a core 2 duo 1.4 - 1.6GHz, instead of an i5/i7 at a similar clock. It’s cheaper in the base spec, though for lesser specs. And it’s mid release cycle.

To be fair, I don’t think the M11x and the Air are aimed at exactly the same segments - the M11x is 11 inch with as few hardware compromises as possible, while the Air is about light and small above all, without being a netbook. But I don’t know what is available in the same precise segment as the Air, and Jason is probably OK with a little more mass to get better performance.

[EDIT]And fuck you people for making me look all this up, now I want an M11x.

I bought an m11x this year, it’s a great little machine.

Omanol: To be fair, I think that the smaller MBP may be a better analog, but to be honest, I don’t know a damn thing about Macs :)

You can go with an AMD E-350 laptop like the Lenovo X120e.

The older Alienware M11x with the Core 2 Duo processor can be had for $599 with a coupon.

That looks great! OP should pick one of these up unless they would rather get an iPad with a keyboard case or something.

If cost and weight are less important to you, check out the Lenovo X220. This review claims FIFTEEN hours of uptime when the additional battery (for an additional $179) is docked, for a total weight of under 4 lbs. Without the additional battery, the weight is similar to netbooks at under 3 lbs.

It’s got a regular Core i5 under the hood. which should address your speed issues. Or crush them.

You can upgrade it with an IPS screen and an SSD. Just back up regularly, don’t mind those SSD failure threads on this forum.

It doesn’t have good graphics (newest generation Intel integrated, which should be slower than an ION chipset, but not much slower). At least the CPU bottleneck for gaming vanishes.

At 1.3KG (with 29Wh 4 cell battery) and barely under 2 with the 94Wh 9 cell and the additional 64Wh 6 cell battery the X220 is still pretty light.

Anybody use a Fusion-based laptop like this one or the Pavilion dm1z? Initial reviews I’ve seen have been positive; seems to find a reasonable middle ground between the dirt-cheap-but-anemic Atom netbooks and the faster-but-bulkier-and-more-power-hungry entry-level laptops. [Although it looks like the original Alienware M11x is still a much better choice for gaming if you’re willing to pony up the extra dough.] But I always like to get the Hivemind’s tech opinion as well. :-)

I just want an M11x that is a 15 inch screen but keeps the same battery life. ;)

I’m in a similar with my old gateway. Also I’ve got about 2 dozen Windows updates that fail to install. Flash has seemed to gotten more intensive in the last year and I’m starting to want to edit photos and video on the go.

Still not 100% sure of purchase. Was going to get a macbook pro but that’s a bit too much. Both that Alienware(with custom naming plate! ha) and the Lenovo x220 look good. I could get an IPS screen as well, which would help with photo editing.
Decisions. Decisions.

Lenovo has a 10% off code BESTSELLER until Sunday.

Lenovo almost always has %off codes; I wouldn’t buy without one.

The X220 looks like honestly basically the perfect laptop except for that horrid 1366x768 resolution.

Yeah, m11x is what you want. Be sure to check out the EPP before buying.

The Mac has superb battery life. When running Mac OS X. It’s much shorter under Windows (Boot Camp drivers for Windows aren’t well tested/optimized in my personal experience – Apple never did fully fix the audio drivers on my 13" MacBook Pro), and heaven help you if you try to run a Windows VM under OS X on battery. The MacBook Pro is an excellent Mac, but it’s a quirky Windows PC.

Currently using an Acer with the e350. I can’t give you much guidance on the battery, as I bought the cheapest e350 I could get my hands on, and they skimped on the battery. As far as performance, as long as I had 4 gigs of ram in I haven’t had any problems. I use it for mainly light browsing, text editing, and some video playing, which it does fine at.

Still, for any photoshop usage, anything like the m11x, or even the air will cream it. I would wonder about heavy photoshop filters and the like. Seen here, it has some floating point issues that might make heavy work in graphics troublesome.

If you look at some of the other benchmarks at Anandtech, you’ll see it cream the atoms, but the reason it does is because the built in GPU is much better than an nvidia ion, and destroys anything Intel has come up with. This is reflected in where interest has really heated up for the chipset: the htpc market.

The eeepad transformer android tablet/netbook device is extremely cool, and has a 16 hour battery life. It all depends on what you need the netbook to actually do.

Microsoft wants you to Do The Math ahahahaha