While you can pre-order the Lenovo S10, I can’t
As I catch up on a week’s worth of RSS feeds, I see from Liliputing that the Lenovo Ideapad S10 order page is up and running. I just hit it up and see that you can pre-order a red, white or blue black unit starting at $429 for black and an other $10 for red or white. All of these are XP units, which explains the additional cost: the original press release indicated pricing at $399 and up, so clearly that cost was for a Linux unit.
I know that many folks are placing orders now that the netbook has seen the light of day with LAPTOP Magazine’s hands-on and the Notebooks.com video. As much as I would like to get my hands on the S10, I’m going to pass. I can already tell you that I’ll likely pass on the Dell netbook that’s expected to surface in the news tomorrow as well. And one of the may Eee PC models? They’re all gone from my wish-list as well at this point.
Using the Acer Aspire One got me to realize that I have a veryspecific requirement from a netbook, one that I alluded to in a priorcomment, but now I’ll point it out front-and-center. All of thenetbooks I crossed off my list have one item in common: a smallRight-Shift key in a non-standard placement on the keyboard. Yup, I’mbeing picky here, but this aspect challenged me with the original EeePC and after using the Acer, I know this this a requirement for me. The Acer does have a full sized Right+Shift key in the proper placement and it’s a much more enjoyable typing experience as a result.
Plenty of people will happily overlook this need; I know it’s apersonal requirement for me. However, I’ve always felt that if you’regoing to add weight and space with a keyboard, it ought to be ano-compromise bit of hardware. It’s why I almost never use thethumb-board on my Q1UP to be honest. If these are companion devices, Iwant them to have the same general keyboarding that my main device has,i.e.: I don’t feel I should have to change how I physically type whenalternating between my main and companion device. As I said… I’mbeing picky, but I just can’t give in on that requirement. ;)
More to follow the Acer Aspire One as I did install Windows XPyesterday while Barb was resting. First impressions: I’m not too happywith the performance due to the slow SSD data transfer rates.
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Kevin,
I’m ready to pull the trigger on the Acer Aspire One with the 120gb harddrive and XP pre-installed. Do you feel the sluggish response is solely due to the SSD, meaning the 1.6 Atom processor can handle XP fine with a conventional harddrive? Thanks for the review (and the right shift key has been one of the main determining factors for me too). Typing speed is dependent on hitting the shift and not the up arrow as on some other keyboards.
The Wind has 34 mm left and 30 mm right shift. I checked the several keyboards that i have hooked up in my cube. The wear marks on all of my keyboards are within those specs. The Dell D630 in have, has a 52mm right shift. Its that big just for fill the space under the Enter key. I never noticed it, but every keyboard has an extra 10 mm on the right shift to fill the space under the Enter key.
I used Win XP on my primary 1.4 Ghz CPU desktop for 4 years. I would expect a state-of-the-art 1.6 Ghz CPU to easily handle XP. Heck, I would expect it to handle Vista. Is that too much to expect?
@Gabe: MSI Wind, Asus 1000, etc, running XP fine with the same Atom and overall guts. It’s the SSD in the Acer. It’s baaaad slow.
So Kevin, gonna do a tnkgrl-like HD implant?
Kev, nope the S10 has been said by Lenovo from the press release that we covered that there will not be a Linux version of the S10, that there will be a 9-inch Linux version offered outside of the US only. Looking back at our original post it clearly states that the two models of the S10, $399 & $429 will both run XP. The difference is 512 MB/80 GB vs 1 GB/160GB of memory/HDD.
http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/08/mini-notebook-o.html
Scott_H : The MSI Wind I have runs Xp flawlessly. It even runs Office 2007 very quickly at about a 2 second load time. I am willing to guess if it had to read from an extremely slow storage location it might take some time, especially if it had to write anything to a page file. If I had an Aspire I would think about adding a second GB of RAM and disabling the page file. I would expect to see a performance boost. I have disabled the page file to squeeze out a little extra run time from my 3 cell battery. I didn’t notice any performance change, but then again everything was already running pretty fast.
I’ve been playing around with several different OS installs on my EEE PC 4G. I tried XP and several flavors of Ubuntu that were all customized for the EEE PC or small devices. After trying each, I keep going back to the default Xandros install. Why? I’m only going to use this device for web surfing, email, and light work. I can do what I need to do using the installed apps. The flash drive is too small to load a bunch of programs and data anyway, and it’s just not the device I’d just for longer work sessions. The default Xandros install suits these needs and doesn’t add extra overhead to slow things down.
Gabe, Mike is correct: the 1.6 GHz Atom can easily handle XP; the slow SSD is the bottleneck.
Mike: there’s little to no point in my modding to add a traditional hard drive. It would make more sense to me for the extra $20 to get the XP model with hard drive and extra 512 MB of memory.
James, I know what the PR said on the Lenovo S10, but take a look at the pre-order page: all of the S10 models at $429 and $439 have the 512 MB RAM / 80 GB hard drive configuration. An XP model with 1 GB RAM / 160 GB drive will certainly cost more. Given that they’ve changed from the original PR, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them offer a Linux model when they said they wouldn’t.
Kevin: I just received my Aspire One w/Linux. It rocks although I think I will also get the Dell 910 w/SUSE Linux. I specifically chose the Aspire One Linux model because I knew that XP would be too slow even on the HD model. And, it will only get slower over time as the monolithic registry goes and all those anti-malware apps get larger and larger databases to check through.
I have had the Aspire One with XP for about a week. It is not sluggish due to the HD. It runs quite nicely. It is not as fast as my HP 6120 with a Pentium M and 1.5GB memory but it is very nicely done.
it will make a very nice mobile device for my traveling needs
..wiley
NW Harris County