My netbook experience, even slower then I thought

[taltamir]

So, I bought a netbook in costco some time ago. I wanted a light computer and I wanted to give netbooks a chance. Costco has a 90 days return policy on those and I figured if I didn't like it I would return it (I was too scared to buy those anywhere else; I fully intended to keep it unless it was really bad). I have seen people play wow on it and I had no intention of playing games, only carry it around for the occasional connection to the internet or opening a document. I got a pinetrail atom with the GPU and CPU on same package (not same die).

Positive: It is very very light. I did not imagine how much of a difference it would make to go down from an 8lbs laptop to a 2.7lbs netbook. but it was incredibly light and that was very impressive.

Negative: I don't know how people can say its "just for the internet", its way too slow for that. Web-pages take forever to load, checking my email (gmail) takes considerably longer to load, opening one single document or one single web page takes forever to load.
I get 100% CPU usage for every little thing I do. whether it is opening a PDF, a word document, or a website. From the off state to the point where I am in a website or viewing a document can take 5 minutes. Navigating web pages takes forever and results in 100% CPU usage. Forget multi-tasking, a netbook cannot single task effectively.
Very unfortunate as I really liked the price and the weight.

 

[JWade]

do you have 1gb of ram or 2gb of ram? upgrading to 2gb of ram makes a big difference

 

[Bateluer]

What model did you get? Is it running XP Home or 7 Starter? Linux works much better on Netbooks than any windows OS.

 

[Zap]

Positive: It is very very light. I did not imagine how much of a difference it would make to go down from an 8lbs laptop to a 2.7lbs netbook. but it was incredibly light and that was very impressive.

Negative: I don't know how people can say its "just for the internet", its way too slow for that. Web-pages take forever to load, checking my email (gmail) takes considerably longer to load, opening one single document or one single web page takes forever to load.

That's why I want to sell my netbook and buy one of the CULV offerings. I'll get the light weight, battery life and performance at the cost of, well, cost.

 

[taltamir]

What model did you get? Is it running XP Home or 7 Starter? Linux works much better on Netbooks than any windows OS.

I got Acer A0532H with Atom N450.
It had windows 7 starter, IIRC it had 2GB of ram.
There are 7 different versions of it though: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_n...Dcomputers&field-keywords=Acer+A0532H&x=0&y=0
I don't quite remember all the details so I am not sure which one I had, one of the blue ones.

That's why I want to sell my netbook and buy one of the CULV offerings. I'll get the light weight, battery life and performance at the cost of, well, cost.

yea, CULVs get the same weight and battery, but much better performance. Price is higher though.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Three things:

1. Netbooks come with junkie slow HDs. Replace on with a SSD and it flies.

2. Many netbooks allow overclocking. Since the Atom has in order execution, a speed boost helps usage performance a lot. My HP Mini 311 hits 2.2GHZ stable.

3. Many netbooks come with junk Intel GPUs. Combine that with Windows Vista/7 and things crawl. An ION netbook with a real GPU is much better.

 

[MJinZ]

I should make a Youtube video of my Netbook usage with 1/2 the screen playing an HD Movie and the other half surfing the web at full speed.

 

[MJinZ]

That's why I want to sell my netbook and buy one of the CULV offerings. I'll get the light weight, battery life and performance at the cost of, well, cost.

In reality, if that were the case, Netbooks wouldn't exist.

A CULV will offer similar weight, 1/2 the battery life, and improved performance at larger prices.

Nothing touches my 1005PE on the go. It keeps my Droid charged and lasts about 10 hours on PDANet...

 

[taltamir]

Three things:

1. Netbooks come with junkie slow HDs. Replace on with a SSD and it flies.

2. Many netbooks allow overclocking. Since the Atom has in order execution, a speed boost helps usage performance a lot. My HP Mini 311 hits 2.2GHZ stable.

3. Many netbooks come with junk Intel GPUs. Combine that with Windows Vista/7 and things crawl. An ION netbook with a real GPU is much better.

1. An SSD costs almost as much as the entire netbook.
Also, any action would send my CPU to 100%, it seemed very CPU limited.

2. I am not overclocking a mobile.

3. Yes, it crawls... but intel has cut out nvidia from the market. the new pinetrails are incompatible with ION and nvidia is legally barred from making a compatible version. Not to mention it adds to cost, heat, etc... and wouldn't really help with CPU limited operations (indecently, any operation is CPU limited on it)

In reality, if that were the case, Netbooks wouldn't exist.

A CULV will offer similar weight, 1/2 the battery life, and improved performance at larger prices.

Nothing touches my 1005PE on the go. It keeps my Droid charged and lasts about 10 hours on PDANet...

he never said anything about price.

And price is the reason for nettops. CULVs used to cost well over 1600+$. The existance of 300$ nettops drove price down on CULVs a whole lot. A superlight CULV still costs a lot more then a nettop.

 

[Zap]

CULVs ... Price is higher though.

Yes, I alluded to that with the "added cost of cost."

3. Many netbooks come with junk Intel GPUs. Combine that with Windows Vista/7 and things crawl. An ION netbook with a real GPU is much better.

It also costs more and the battery life is lower. Hey, why not just get a CULV then?

A CULV will offer similar weight, 1/2 the battery life, and improved performance at larger prices.

Nothing touches my 1005PE on the go. It keeps my Droid charged and lasts about 10 hours on PDANet...

The 1005PE gets more battery life than most other netbooks, so it is an outlier. CULV gets similar battery life because they have bigger batteries.

After having lived with my MSI Wind for 1½ years, I'm through with netbooks. New ones are basically exactly the same but with slightly lower weight and better battery life. That's great, except I want more screen resolution and more performance. My perfect notebook would be one using the Core i7 Mobile 620UM or 640UM with an 11.6" or 13.3" screen weighing 3.5 pounds or less and maybe with Optimus tech.

 

[taltamir]

After having lived with my MSI Wind for 1½ years, I'm through with netbooks. New ones are basically exactly the same but with slightly lower weight and better battery life. That's great, except I want more screen resolution and more performance. My perfect notebook would be one using the Core i7 Mobile 620UM or 640UM with an 11.6" or 13.3" screen weighing 3.5 pounds or less and maybe with Optimus tech.

This sounds perfect... Although, to be truly perfect it would have to be weightless
I will ask my physics professor if he can let me borrow a few of his frictionless surfaces, I think if I coat the laptop with them it would slip out of gravity and float...

 

[MJinZ]

Yes, I alluded to that with the "added cost of cost."



It also costs more and the battery life is lower. Hey, why not just get a CULV then?



The 1005PE gets more battery life than most other netbooks, so it is an outlier. CULV gets similar battery life because they have bigger batteries.

After having lived with my MSI Wind for 1½ years, I'm through with netbooks. New ones are basically exactly the same but with slightly lower weight and better battery life. That's great, except I want more screen resolution and more performance. My perfect notebook would be one using the Core i7 Mobile 620UM or 640UM with an 11.6" or 13.3" screen weighing 3.5 pounds or less and maybe with Optimus tech.

I can't wait for a 2ghz Atom.

There is absolutely no need to insane performance on a Netbook that is intended to last on the go, not crunch numbers.

At 1.6ghz, I can already watch Hulu just fine. HD videos are a pushover with 50+ FPS and 1/2 CPU usage.

2ghz should ensure 30FPS flash performance.

 

[taltamir]

I can't wait for a 2ghz Atom.

There is absolutely no need to insane performance on a Netbook that is intended to last on the go, not crunch numbers.

At 1.6ghz, I can already watch Hulu just fine. HD videos are a pushover with 50+ FPS and 1/2 CPU usage.

2ghz should ensure 30FPS flash performance.

a 1.6ghz atom takes forever to do anything. It takes me forever to open documents, load windows, surf the internet, etc... 2ghz would not fix it... it needs multiple cores, maybe some out of order execution, etc... basically, it needs to be a CULV.
Not dropping frames on hulu, or playing wow (I have seen it do both) don't help me, anyone who gets it gets it to WORK... and work means doing basic things (internet and documents) quickly. if it does those noticeably slower then its impeding your ability to work and fails at its primary task.

Also, I wish flash a painful death. HTML5 FTW

 

[MJinZ]

a 1.6ghz atom takes forever to do anything. It takes me forever to open documents, load windows, surf the internet, etc... 2ghz would not fix it... it needs multiple cores, maybe some out of order execution, etc... basically, it needs to be a CULV.
Not dropping frames on hulu, or playing wow (I have seen it do both) don't help me, anyone who gets it gets it to WORK... and work means doing basic things (internet and documents) quickly. if it does those noticeably slower then its impeding your ability to work and fails at its primary task.

Also, I wish flash a painful death. HTML5 FTW

LOL? I'm not sure what you're using, but when I'm remoted into my Office, I can do a lot of work. And because of our servers and bandwidth limitations, I'm looking at slower than Netbook speeds.

Like I said, I don't know what the hell you bought but I can watch an HD Movie and surf the internet at bandwidth limited speeds (not CPU limited).. at the same time. I've even used it as my main system (hooked up to the monitor) while my Desktop is down for GPU or whatever swaps. It wasn't even just bearable, I could probably live with it all the time doing desktop duty.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

This thread scares me b/c I just ordered an Atom based netbook

 

[frostedflakes]

Meh. I have an old N270 netbook. Obviously it's not as responsive as my desktop, but it works pretty well for web browsing. Added a $20 Broadcom card and now it's a decent HD video player as well.

One thing I'd suggest is using an add-on to block Flash (I know this is available for both Chrome and Firefox). This will prevent Flash ads and other content like that from sucking up precious CPU cycles, which can speed up browsing. It will leave a placeholder for Flash applet, though, so you can click on that if you want to load a specific applet (video player, for example). You can also set these add-ons up to whitelist sites like YouTube. Just rendering web pages shouldn't be that CPU intensive (although Javascript heavy stuff like GMail does take a few seconds longer to load on my netbook than my desktop). I suspect your issue was Flash on web pages pegging the CPU and slowing other things down.

 

[Fayd]

This thread scares me b/c I just ordered an Atom based netbook

the atom is fine for web surfing.

my main complaint is harddrive access speed. that, and my atom can't handle HD videos.

so i re-encode everything to 1024x576, and it plays that fine.

 

[IntelUser2000]

1. An SSD costs almost as much as the entire netbook.
Also, any action would send my CPU to 100%, it seemed very CPU limited.

It shouldn't be that slow. My brother used to have a Acer Aspire for his main PC and it wasn't slow at all for what he did(flash, internet, video).

I have a Atom based UMPC. It seems to run fine. My desktop PC is definitely faster even web browing than the UMPC, but that's using Core i5 and X25-M so it should be.

SSD would definitely help. Sometimes the hard drive in there is so slow that it looks like its the CPU, but for some of them its not. Of course, for the price of an SSD, it lowers the attractiveness of getting a Netbook.

Maybe you should go back to XP. Windows 7, no matter how anybody says its "lean" or "efficient", it doesn't compare to XP. My UMPC is on XP.

 

[Emulex]

make sure you run OSX ; its far faster.

And an intel SSD makes all the difference.

 

[kalster]

i agree with emulex. hackintosh it. osx runs beautifully on netbooks. i recently bought a 1005ha and installed snow leopard on it, its perfect. i am selling my older dual core laptop that was also running snow leopard coz the netbook with snow leopard does everything i want

 

[dawza]

My Mini 9, with its POS stock SSD, was absolutely terrible. Opening a web browser took 5-10 seconds, and then it was another 5-10 seconds waiting for a webpage to load. Installing FlashFire, a caching app, made all the difference in the world. I am not saying that the HDD/SDD is always the culprit here, but a good SSD can make a noticeable difference; whether one can justify the price is another issue altogether.

Of course, you will still hit CPU bottlenecks all over the place, but at the very least, the system will be competent enough to allow for basic surfing and office apps without inciting incredible amounts of frustration.

I found XP to be generally more responsive than even a stripped-down Vista; no experience with W7 on netbooks, though.

 

[taltamir]

W7 is faster then XP... but it does take up more ram. So in cases where you have very little ram XP could end up faster.
that being said, XP is an obsolete OS from 8 years ago. Every little thing you do, you see how obsolete it is. I hate working with it and I would not. Ubuntu netbook edition is a good suggestion though, I wish I would have tried it.

 

[cbn]

Three things:

1. Netbooks come with junkie slow HDs. Replace on with a SSD and it flies.

2. Many netbooks allow overclocking. Since the Atom has in order execution, a speed boost helps usage performance a lot. My HP Mini 311 hits 2.2GHZ stable.

3. Many netbooks come with junk Intel GPUs. Combine that with Windows Vista/7 and things crawl. An ION netbook with a real GPU is much better.

2. Wow, this mention of OCing surprised me. Is this common for Netbooks? Or is this something specific to HP brand?

3. How much do you think the Intel GPU is affecting regular websurfing/page loading? (I normally think "CPU" with regard to these things for desktop, but with these low watt devices I have no clue where the bottlenecks really occur. I have even heard people complain Intel Desktop IGPs were at one time insufficient for running Aero)

 

[alyarb]

Just to clarify, Clarkdale is MCM. Pinetrail is one die.

 

[Hacp]

WTF are you doing wrong? It should not be THAT slow. Seriously. You are doing something wrong. Have you reinstalled a fresh copy of windows?