Okay, so you might be happy with your Windows 7 installation on your spiffy new Asus Eee, but somehow you miss the Linux installation on your old netbook. You don’t have the patience to install a dual boot, but you really, really want to have Ubuntu running alongside your Windows insallation, you might want to check out Portable Ubuntu.
What does Portable Ubuntu do, exactly? Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive.
Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn’t bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.
Know what? I am so stoked to use this alongside my Windows installation; in fact I am downloading this program right now so I can run Ubuntu. I’ll keep you guys posted. Meanwhile, here’s a screencast:
Recently, the trend is going towards solid-state storage. This means drives that have no moving parts. Most popular of these is flash memory. They’re cheap, durable, and can hold data even without power (unlike volatile RAM, which loses data when power is off). Since flash memory can allegedly reduce consumption caused by spinning hard drives, some manufacturers have switched to using solid state drives for their mobile computers. There are also flash-based hard drives meant for notebook computers that users can replace their existing drives with.
The Asus Eee MyPC sports a flash-based hard drive, instead of a conventional spinning one. One factor may be price (since a small flash drive is cheaper than a micro-sized hard drive with spinning parts). One may be power consumption.
The maximum power difference between a flash drive and a 2.5″ disk is 3 watts. If you average about 3 hours battery life, a flash drive would save at most 9 watt hours (wh). That’s 29 minutes with a 55 wh battery. Less than 20 if it isn’t seeking constantly – and less than 10 minutes if the drive spends half its time in standby mode.
The biggest power sink in my notebook is the “everything else” that stays on when nothing is happening – 13 watts. Next is the CPU when it is busy. Then the display if you keep it above minimum brightness, the DVD/CD player and finally, just above Wi-Fi, a busy disk.
Flash drives have a real advantage in shock resistance over disks. But the performance is about the same as a disk, the power savings minimal and the cost disadvantage huge. They make the most sense for premium ultra-light notebooks with low power CPUs and small screens as well as hand-held devices.
I guess I must add that speed is one of the advantages of flash-based storage over a disc-based one. Still, I’d like to get more juice out of my Eee’s battery.
If you ask me if I can work on making a website three years ago, I’d laugh at you and told you that it would be impossible. I mean, really, how would you be able to make a decent website on the first few netbooks that came out, especially the Asus Eee PC 701 that I first had? No, I’m not dissing the Asus Eee PC 701, it’s the gadget that started this whole netbook revolution and I’m glad to be one of the first owners of that baby, but you know, my current phone’s more powerful than the Eee PC 701. It still has a place in my fat, geeky heart, though.
But, yeah, you can’t expect me t do any serious work on the Eee PC 701, or any of the earlier netbooks. Those babies were so underpowered, with their extremely small screen sizes and cramped keyboards, that anything than the casual logging on to Facebook was a chore. Well, Facebook’s laden with all sorts of javascript that browsing it made any browser crash. Don’t even dream of running Photoshop or even Dreamweaver there.
Thankfully, it’s all changed. Netbooks are still cheap, underpowered and a bit cramped, but they’ve jumped in leaps and bounds so much that it’s possible to actually use Photoshop and build a website on them, because their screen resolutions have come up to respectable levels. We can now make websites, upload them with decent FTP software, and host them on great servers and point to it domain names that we chose.
Cloud hosting, currently only undertaken by a handful of servers, is rapidly becoming the main way in which many companies’ access data on the internet. The cloud, as it is generally referred to, consists of every internet account where data is stored, such as e-mails, accounts held with internet radio sites and online documents, to name but a few instances. A simple example would be a a programme such as Google documents. Once an account has been created, the stored document is accessible from any computer, without having to be stored on any one of them.
Bringing an Asus Eee PC around is really a huge convenience. Our favorite miniscule mini-laptop started this whole netbook thing. With the dawn of these affordable and slightly underpowered and undersized notebooks, everyone suddenly decided to take this whole portable computing thing seriously. I don’t think I’ve seen that many laptop or netbook toting people before, and that’s a good thing.
And that’s the keyword here. Portable. As much as we want to bring our computers with us everywhere we go, there’s a bit of a limitation with carrying our laptops around – how in blue blazes are going to print our documents when needed?
Of course we can upload our files to dropbox, our webmail accounts, or some other cloud storage solution, and go to the nearest internet café to have it printed. And we all know that internet cafés aren’t available everywhere. We may not even have an internet connection – wifi, 3g or otherwise – available to use for uploading our Word documents.
This is why some people opt to buying a portable printer so they can print almost anywhere they want. Of course, it means that they’ll have to bring extra stuff like the printer, paper, and, in some cases, inkjet cartridges. I doubt portable printer owners would bring laser printer toner cartridges around because that would be ridiculous – there are no portable laser printers just yet.
Of course, being portable, these printers would be subject to a few corners cut here and there to ensure that it’ll be light and compact enough to carry around anywhere. You’d lose some features like duplex printing, the clarity of printouts used with Brother printer toner cartidges, and of course I doubt you’d be able to use these gadgets for heavy-duty printing. However, if you need to have hard copies of your documents handy, it won’t hurt to carry one of these babies along with your Asus Eee PC.
I remember the first time I used a netbook. You may do too. You may not remember a lot of details, but you and I can agree that the fact that nothing fits on the damn screen can be annoying.
Well, netbooks have come a long way and app makers have finally adopted interfaces that can be good for netbooks.
One upon a time, most applications were designed for 800 x 600 pixel or lower resolution displays, so of course you could always dig up old programs for your netbook. But a handful of developers are also updating existing applications to optimize them for small screens. Ars Technica has an article on a new version of the Banshee Media Player which has a custom “Cubano” interface designed specifically for netbooks. Banshee was originally designed for Linux, but it also runs on OS X.
Guys, remember the NES? Remember the hours spent on it trying to rescue the princess? Now if you want to go on carrying around something that’ll give you lots more geek cred (because, really an Asus Eee is enough to give you geek cred), then you might consider getting a netbook case that’s patterned after the now-iconic NES controller.
The world has seen the surprising buyers’ turnout for the phenomenal Asus EEE PC 700. Why not? It is more than just a better alternative for the XO-1 laptop of the “One Laptop Per Child” campaign. It has lived to be an “easy to learn, easy to work, and easy to play” device for everyone.
The Asus Eee PC 1015 Netbook is a great option for anyone who needs a small and quick computer to transport around with them, or for Mac users who find they want something that is Windows compatible as well. Whether searching for web hosting reviews or doing that day’s work while relaxing in a coffee shop, you will enjoy this netbook’s speed and efficiency.
Check this out netbook owners. We all are trying to save space on the cramped screen right? Well, if you’re not too fond of using Chrome, here’s the next best thing.
Meerkat optimizes your Firefox so it’ll take up less space on your Eee. It does the following:
Hides the status bar when there is no activity
Removes the menu bar, rebuilt into a drop down button placed on the navigation bar
Adds downloads and bookmarks buttons to the right of the location bar, followed by above mentioned menu bar button
Reduces the navigation bar icon size to the small setting
Believe me, this will help you out a lot. No more squinting!
