Tiny Laptops

jambon79

Sorry if it has been asked before, but my slow work computer won't allow me to search the threads.
I am starting a new (higher paid :j ) job in two weeks time, but alas I will go from walking 30 minutes to work to a 55 minute bus journey. To pass the time, I was looking for a laptop I could take with me to possibly do work on, but more likely play Football Manager on.

I initially looked at the Dell Mini that was perfect in price and size, but on closer inspection only had a 16GB hard drive, which isn't brilliant.

I was wondering if any of you MSE folk out there knew of any alternatives, and if not, would a plug in USB hard drive be a viable option for the Dell one.

Thanks in advance,

jambon

Conor_3

MSI Wind is £349 and has an 80GB HDD

nomoneytoday

The Advent 4211 is a "rebadged" MSI Wind with a lesser battery and is £279 in Dixons, or go to Aldi and pick up their 10" screen, 80gb UMPC for the same price

amcluesent

IMHO all these 'netbook' pose a challenge for gaming. My Asus 901/XP is great, 5+ hour battery life and no-disk to go wonky if it gets a hard knock.

There a whole forum dedicated to discussing what games run on the Asus range of mini laptops - http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewforum.php?id=28

Various Gameboy and NES emulators are knocking about too.

snowqueen555

not sure how well games run, but the battery life on the 4211 is under two hours, so you are paying less for a pants battery.
the eee 901 and 1000 are deccent, and have good battery life

[Deleted User]

amcluesent wrote: »

IMHO all these 'netbook' pose a challenge for gaming. My Asus 901/XP is great, 5+ hour battery life and no-disk to go wonky if it gets a hard knock.

There a whole forum dedicated to discussing what games run on the Asus range of mini laptops - http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewforum.php?id=28

Various Gameboy and NES emulators are knocking about too.

You can run World of Warcraft on them, and at a guess probably most games from around 2004 with little effort..

kwokers

Not sure if I am a bit late to the discussion, but, I seriously wouldn't recommend a laptop with an SSD (solid state drive - very close to compact flash) as it's main storage device for the Laptop - especially, if you want to use it mostly for games.

It's a little known fact that these flash memory based (NAND based if you want to be specific) can only sustain a limited number of writes to it - after that -it's toast.

Why is this relevant? Games will want to achieve the fastest performance possible - if you are doing something particularly complicated in the game, it will more than likely eat up alot of RAM based memory - the next place it will get some more resource is to use the disk (sometimes known as virtual memory or "swap"). In games this happens *alot* - which means on laptops with Flash Memory based drives it'll knacker it fairly quickly.

For you, it will mean you will have a fairly nice shaped paper weight.

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

"Memory wear Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles. Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 write-erase-cycles..."
Granted, I'll admit that wikipedia isn't the be-all & end-all of information archives, but the max number of write-erase cycles isn't far off.
Get one with a hard disk

- it's cheaper per Gigabyte

-you can replace it yourself if it goes wrong
-it'll last longer


Hope this is useful to you.

--edited-

Forgot to add this linK

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/12/rh_bg_netbooks/

This is the latest run down on the smaller laptops that fit into this range - includes Dell Mini, Asus, Aspire etc..

[Deleted User]

Why would you be gaming on a netbook?

jackthenipper

I have a E-Systems ei 3103 which is good for gaming, surfing the internet,emailing & doing allmost anything i need to do with it. Works well for me!

M4RKM

anything with the brand E-Systems i seriously doubt will be good for gaming.. steer clear... awful brand.. made of the cheapest plastic known to man, and if you breathe on it wrongly it'll fall apart

just my opinion

Marty_J

kwokers wrote: »

It's a little known fact that these flash memory based (NAND based if you want to be specific) can only sustain a limited number of writes to it - after that -it's toast.

And HDDs wear out after so many hours.