Roadworthy Laptops

[euphonius]

Jape, ChinaV,

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions. Maybe we should move this to off-topic, but this topic of how to upfit a netbook is definitely appropriate for this forum. Why? Given the risks of weather, trauma, theft, spilled noodles, puke flying from buses, etc, I've wanted to develop a cheap "road laptop" that I could use for 1) email, 2) skype, 3) web browsing and 4) picture and video editing on the fly. I'd prefer not to carry my Macbook, as that is my main working machine and it would be catastrophic to me if it got puked on or stolen or crumpled.

So can we create a new thread called Roadworthy Laptops?

The Samsung was a gift from a Chinese company at their share-listing party, and it's loaded with WinXP in Chinese. Gag me with a hard disk. For an OSX user, if there is nothing uglier and recoil-inducing than WinXP, it's WinXP in Chinese. (I have XP loaded on my Mac in the Bootcamp partition, but I don't think I've ever fired it up.)

Conventional thinking would be to install WinXP in English over the Chinese version, and suffer with XP. Not for me, thanks. I want nothing to do with Windows ever again, even though, as Jape has noted, it's apparently finally gotten to be a tolerably good operating system. A year ago, when I got this little netbook, I was attracted to Moblin as it had a reputation for support (which seemed to have had an easy interface and some commercial backing), but now I read it's been superceded by something called MeeGo, whatever that is. There must be 100 choices of distro out there, which is 99 too many for me. I'm not that dedicated to this project. I'm not ruling out some Linux flavor, but it seems there's still a lot of churn and partisanship out there. I'm not a technie, and I want an easy path.

Now OSX -- that's an interesting idea and one that had not occurred to me. So I'll perhaps spend an hour or two this afternoon at least reading up on the idea, starting with that link you forwarded, and see if I can find anyone who's done it on the N128.

Thanks!

[euphonius]

OK, I am going to give it a try with that protocol that ChinaV forwarded, based on the close similarity of the N120 to my N128 as indicated by this side-by-side comparison.

cheers

[ChinaV]

I moved your posts into this new thread, good luck with the Hackintosh, I think the N120 and N128 are pretty close so it should work.

The one catch that people seem to get hung up on with netbooks is the photo/video editing. This is where these devices fall flat. They're getting more powerful, but the Atom processor and video cards most manufacturers use just don't have the horsepower necessary to perform these tasks.

Cheers!
ChinaV

[jape]

der!

so you end up with a 'hackintosh' that Apple deliberately scuppered past 10.5 as they of course knew they were going to have the Ipad and other delights coming out and wanted to kill stone dead any Apple netbook types. Well heck, the best way to deal with the OS wars I suppose is to just use the one that does it for you and not get too proprietary so if it works, fly it mate. Have fun!

[euphonius]

Jape, appreciate your sentiments very much, and loathe the way Apple manipulates its customers. But I only have so much gray matter for tech stuff, and don't at this stage in life want to stuff myself full of another disparate system, having at long last -- as you yourself have done -- purged my fading bioROM of Windows.

I just don't want to have to take my shiny Mac on the road, but want to be able to stay in touch and upload pix so I don't find myself in the situation I'm in now -- having multiple ride reports stacking up in the to-do pile!

cheers

[jape]

Yeah, I recognise all that mate, hence the last sentence;, in the end if it does what you want then it is worth the money or time and effort.

When CC gets back, we might ask to get a techie section for phones/GPS/computers/cameras and assorted accessories, maybe service providers, we all use them and it is good to get the 'ride reports' on these devices and their accessories too. They have direct or indirect relevance to motorcycling and travelling!

[td_ref]

Any laptop other than genuine Mac runs OSX must have Steve Jobs' blessing. If you could manage all the components work properly (Screen brightness adjustable? Sound card can make noise? Ethernet working? Wifi receve signls? Video plays? Screen resolution display correctly? Core video working?........), the hackingtosh would be my first choice too. Or less pain for fine-turning everything after OS installation, Ubuntu Linux, maybe?

[moilami]

Jape, ChinaV,

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions. Maybe we should move this to off-topic, but this topic of how to upfit a netbook is definitely appropriate for this forum. Why? Given the risks of weather, trauma, theft, spilled noodles, puke flying from buses, etc, I've wanted to develop a cheap "road laptop" that I could use for 1) email, 2) skype, 3) web browsing and 4) picture and video editing on the fly. I'd prefer not to carry my Macbook, as that is my main working machine and it would be catastrophic to me if it got puked on or stolen or crumpled.

So can we create a new thread called Roadworthy Laptops?

The Samsung was a gift from a Chinese company at their share-listing party, and it's loaded with WinXP in Chinese. Gag me with a hard disk. For an OSX user, if there is nothing uglier and recoil-inducing than WinXP, it's WinXP in Chinese. (I have XP loaded on my Mac in the Bootcamp partition, but I don't think I've ever fired it up.)

Conventional thinking would be to install WinXP in English over the Chinese version, and suffer with XP. Not for me, thanks. I want nothing to do with Windows ever again, even though, as Jape has noted, it's apparently finally gotten to be a tolerably good operating system. A year ago, when I got this little netbook, I was attracted to Moblin as it had a reputation for support (which seemed to have had an easy interface and some commercial backing), but now I read it's been superceded by something called MeeGo, whatever that is. There must be 100 choices of distro out there, which is 99 too many for me. I'm not that dedicated to this project. I'm not ruling out some Linux flavor, but it seems there's still a lot of churn and partisanship out there. I'm not a technie, and I want an easy path.

Now OSX -- that's an interesting idea and one that had not occurred to me. So I'll perhaps spend an hour or two this afternoon at least reading up on the idea, starting with that link you forwarded, and see if I can find anyone who's done it on the N128.

Thanks!

I would buy the cheapest crap with SSD disk I can get and install GNU/Linux on it. Would work for sure well enough.

[slabo]

traditionally, Thinkpads, especially the T series, were thought to do this well. Recently, since ~2 years, HP introduced the Elite series. After the Thinkpad brand was sold to Lenovo, many people arevsaying Thinkpad isn't what it's used to be. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en...5-3955549.html

Have a look. Many are saying HP Elite now beats IBM Thinkpad.

HP Elitebook 2560p

[felix]

I bought a HP DM1 recently with intentions of using it as my roadbook. (yes, i just coined that)



It received great reviews everywhere so i decided to go for it. I found it on taobao, then went to the shop to buy it directly. I paid RMB 3050 for it, which is a great price for this machine.
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=10091367375

I haven't had a chance to test it on the road yet, but reckon it'll do just fine. 11" is a good size, small and light but with full size keys that are nice to type on. The AMD chip is much more powerful than what you get in a netbook (it handles photoshop CS4 pretty well and plays HD video flawlessly) yet i still get 5 - 7 hours battery in normal use, which is amazing. It's all plastic but feels sturdy enough. Also has the best speakers of any laptop i've owned.

I reckon it's hard to beat for the money.

It came with a crappy chinese version of windows 7. I called HP to see if they could give me an english version but they said they couldn't so i just downloaded a hacked one from torrents, wiped the computer and installed that. No problems after. I'm not a trekkie and therefore know nothing about linux and things like that.