Solid State Notebooks, Also Linux

Jake'sGran

This should probably be two threads - if you agree please say.

In last weeks Sunday Times the Ingear Section included an article about laptops. They start by saying that "solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive, making them lighter and faster to start up".
What does solid state mean?. I did have a look on Techie Terms but it does not seem to be well subscribed.

Also, in the same article they give 5 stars to Acer Aspire One @ £234 but it runs Linux. For someone who has only ever used Windows is it best to avoid Linux?

PS Sorry about the Caps in the title.

Incisor

The disk drive has moving parts and has to get the read heads over the right area to read data. They are slow and consume lots of power, but have large capacity. Solid state memory is all electronic with no moving parts, is faster and probably doesn't consume so much energy.

Depends what you want to do, Linux is absolutely excellent for many things. For almost everything there is an equivalent. Firefox web browser I believe started as a Linux program. But if you want to stick with all of your windows favourite programs, you might be disappointed. Personally I am not going back to windows.

Viper_7

Solid state is the future. The weak point in computers is the Hard disk drive due to the moving parts, and the medium of storage - magnetism.

People think notebooks/laptops are portable - can be used on the move. That's not really the case, well they can but if you move it around the hard disk drive heads will be smacking against the platters. People who use these things on the move will find they don't last too long!

Large solid state drives are very expensive at the moment, but the costs will come down, also due to the nature of them, I think they will be much cheaper to produce than hard disk drives.
For now, I would avoid them as they are expensive and the capacity isn't quite there yet for the home user, but say 2 years....

culpepper

you can find video reviews of the acer aspire one on youtube.
There is also the eeepc which has a solid state drive and comes with windows or linux depending on the version you buy.
I like linux but if you have any programmes that only run in windows, you might have problems running them on linux.

amcluesent

>For someone who has only ever used Windows is it best to avoid Linux?<

Yes. Linux appeals to hard-core techies 'cos they're sticking it to 'the man' (Bill Gates) but the learning curve is steep and nothing 'just works' it all requires hacking obscure /etc/init files. If you think a T-shirt with 'There's no place like 127.0.0.1' is hilarious, then you're ready for Linux.

asininity

Linux isn't just about hardcore techies sticking it to the man. Its for people who find it annoying that nearly a third of the price of a cheap computer system is the software. Not only that but you don't have to upgrade the hardware when the newer OS comes out. Thats why M$ don't really like these netbooks because the only OS they have that will run on them is the one that they're trying to get rid of. XP with be a lot slower on these as well.

You can pretty much know that with linux pre-installed it will "just work" out of the box. If it didn't they wouldn't sell many. The difference is that you'll get all the software you'll need ie office suite etc without paying for more.

I'm gonna buy the acer one because its cheaper than the rest atm and I'll be getting the hard drive. Apparently the solid state drive is slower according to most reviews. And its not that much space.

monkeybutler_2

@asininity
between 20-50 is added to the price of a pc to have Windows on it- not a bad price to pay, especially when you consider that you can download pretty much any flavour of Linux you want and install it yourself.

As an aside, most of the really decent popular free programs (i.e. Open Office, the Gimp, Firefox) are all available for Windows too. I own an Asus eee, which at various points I've had it running both XP and Xubuntu. If anything, XP booted much more quickly, however as with Compiz- fusion running Xubuntu was much more shiny and better suited to managing multiple windows on a small screen I use that now. It really is a myth that a propper install of Windows XP is slow.

@amcluesent

Linux really is dead easy to use now- you only start to have problems if your hardware isn't supported, which isn't likely, or if you are trying to use software with it which is still in a pre-beta state. Or of course if you start changing too many important files, like your xorgconf. But then you'd run the risk of knackering everything if you started modding your registry, or any other important system files in Windows.

Conclusion- both Windows and Linux are great, and both of the above posters are letting personal bias stand in the way of giving the OP a decent answer.

asininity

@ moneybulter

Is that 20 - 50 percent or quid? Windows doesn't really attract me that much especially when you can do more with free software.

I think I'd install puppylinux on the acer if I was going to swap linpus for something, can't get quicker than RAM.

I'd say on a brand new install of xp you could have about the small boot and operating speed as ubuntu for about a month, after that you're defraging and running registry scans and eventually you'll need a clean install.

Another thing to consider is these netbooks aren't high spec so along with all that you need to be running all your security software, run a scan you'll either barely manage to browse especially if like most "non-tech" your'e conned with norton, or running the scan as a low priority it'll take hours.

monkeybutler_2

20-50 quid, all depends on who you buy the pc from, which edition of Windows it is, and how much crapware, and trials the thing comes with.

There are reports of people happily running a pretty nippy Vista installation on the eee pc, and as I say I managed happily with XP for a while. In fact I still have a six year old desktop I use for studio work running on XP, which by todays standards is incredibly underpowered! I'll agree Norton is shoddy- but AVG free is great, and much less resource heavy.

Re free software, it really all depends on what you are trying to do- if you are trying to do audio work then open source stuff is years behind the commercial alternatives.

I reckon looking at the Acers specs, you'd have no problem at all running the full version of Ubuntu on it, or maybe doing as I did with Xubuntu as xfce is a lot lighter than gnome.

asininity

20 - 50 for xp not vista. I would also like the choice as to what OS I want when I buy a new PC, getting your money back from a retailer because you don't agree with the terms and conditions of the windows thats already installed on you PC is a pain.

I used to rate AVG until they bought out number 8 now I'm with Antivir. I like the Luke Filewalker scanner:D.

I'll definitely agree that some opensource tends to be a bit behind the times in some areas. A lot though is top notch and even better than commercial stuff. At the end of the day though you'd expect that, thats what you pay your money for.

XP will run ok on a 6 year old pc sure but with linux you get all the eyecandy of vista and more running on it probably faster and more stable that xp.

Netbook wise though XP will be very hard pressed to beat linux, vista doesn't stand a chance. It could be argued the same with servers software.

I'll be trying Xubuntu but first its puppy it runs purely in RAM so is lightening quick.

Conor_3

asininity wrote: »

You can pretty much know that with linux pre-installed it will "just work" out of the box.

ROFLMFAO.

Riight. So they've managed to fix power management which doesn't work, the hard drive power cycle count bug and also got fully functional wifi that works just as easily as it does in Windows? Managed to get sound in Flash video on websites when your distribution uses PulseAudio?

Want to access shares over a Windows network? No problem.Simply modify every Windows user account on every Windows PC in your network to have a password. Click on the Network Sharing in Mandrivas Control Center to find it does nothing at all. Enable it in Ubuntu then find nobody can access anything until you spend half an hour trawling the forums to find you need to do smbpasswd -a for each Windows user that requires access using their username and password they log into Windows with then find it doesn't work still because linux is case sensetive and you have or have not capitalised the user name.

And then when you upgrade say Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04, find that a lot of the stuff that did work, such as wifi, no longer does because they've changed something which broke it.