Lately I have been caught up in the “ultra/sub” portable craze. I have been looking at the Acer Aspire One and the EEEPC groups.
I travel on and off and also like to work in different areas of the house so I thought that this would be a good way to go at about a $400 to about $700 premium. So I started to look at what I was going to get for that price and how it performed.
Then I notice some general performance oddities with the atom chips – they are not that fast. Reviews seem to peg the 1.6 atom at about the same as a 900mhz celeron. So the new 1000 EEPC does not seem like such a deal. I wanted to look around at some older sub laptops to compare. I appeared not to be alone in this fact.
Basically I said, what can I get for less than $400 used. I was thinking originally those older small Sony Vaio systems, but ran across a little IBM X31 with a dock on craigslist.com for about $300 and for about $75 I ordered 2 GB of ram.. Total $375.
My IBM X31:
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Intel Pentium M 1.7 GHz Processor
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2GB PC2300 DDR 333 Memory
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40 Gigabyte Hard Drive
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8x DVD-ROM CDRW Optical Drive (X3 UltraBase)
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12.1″ XGA TFT Display and ATI Radeon Mobility Graphics with 16MB Memory
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SoundMax Audio
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v.92 56Kbps Modem, 10/100/1000 Ethernet and Intel 802.11a/b/g Wireless
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Two USB 2.0 and One FireWire Ports
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10.7″ x 8.8″ x 1.2″ @ 3.6 lbs. (without X3 UltraBase) Seems lighter though possibly because of the cells I have.
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Ubuntu 8.0.4
An EEEPC 1000 about
$700:
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Operating System: GNU Linux
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Display: 10″
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Intel CPU & Chipset: Intel® Atom N270
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Wireless Data Network: WLAN: 802.11 n
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Memory: 1GB (DDR2)
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S.S.D. Storage (Solid-State Drive) SSD 40GB
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Camera: 1.3M Pixel
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Audio Hi-definition Audio
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Stereo speaker
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Digital Array Mic
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Battery: 6 Cells, Up to 8 hrs*
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Weight 7.5 x 10.5 x 1.1 inches @1.33 kg (about 3lbs)
So they are about the same size and if I wanted to put in a SSD they would be almost the same cost and I would still have better performance. Ok it has a cam and longer battery life.
So before jumping on some of the hype wagons, you may want to hunt around.
I have been more than happy with this little box and Ubuntu went on without a hitch.
