;)
I will admit I don't have a good opinion of Acer. Way back in 1998, I pondered buying one as my second "real" computer...I bought an HP instead. But more recently, they have flooded Wal-Marts and electronics stores everywhere with the flimsiest plastic they could pass off on unsuspecting customers. However, this laptop was shockingly well-built, and had a good feel to it.
This one, though, felt much better:
;)
The HP is remarkably heavy, and has a buttoned-down feel to its keyboard that even full-sized laptops seem to lack these days. Both of them have well-built hinges on them, which is strange to me since most laptops are weak here. I've seen many Compaq and HP laptops cracked here, held together by one hinge instead of two. There is really a lot of repeated force put on this joint; there's a lot of friction necessary to hold up the monitor, and it's got a lot of leverage. It's nice to see they are fixing this.
Another fascinating note is that neither of these has Vista. The Acer has 512MB of memory and the HP had 1GB; the Acer I used had an 8GB Solid-State Drive, and the HP had a conventional 120GB drive. In either instance, that's not enough to run Vista. All of those widgets and glossy interfaces make for a hungry OS. So for now, the HP sticks with XP (even though its sticker says "Vista Home") and the Acer runs, shocker, Linux. It's a starkly minimalist system, with nothing but a launcher. It's reminiscent of the gradeschool Mac systems I used to work on. Nothing to hurt yourself with, just big jolly candy-like buttons. Then again, what are you going to use a mini-book like this for, anyway? Neither it nor the HP have enough juice to run serious 3D game stuff, and the screen's too small to do anything like CAD, or even movie-watching. No, you'll use it for the web, and that is a point I tried to make to school administrators for years. The power was moving and has moved to the server...the desktop is becoming more of a dumb terminal for the internet. You don't need a 3GHz machine to run a web browser. Yet for years, I was relatively complacent as school districts neatly aligned rows of top-spec machines to be used for...browsing the internet for articles on teenage drinking or something. But the fact is that Vista designed in an era when Intel was promising 10GHz processors and limitless "Moore's Law."...and not an era when processors were pulling 150 watts and struggling to cool themselves. It was designed for an alternate reality that does not exist...and thus XP soldiers on in this role, and will for the foreseeable future.
In conclusion, these are fascinating devices, and so far the manufacturers are taking the high road and keeping them relatively expensive...and of reasonable quality.
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( 0 / 0 )I'm sitting here working; I thought I'd drop a mental note in here. I've been running my server successfully for awhile now; it works fine as long as I set it to reboot every two hours. I think that USB wireless unit just can't cope with being on continuously for so long. So two hours it is...unless I decide to change it to three hours.
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( 0 / 0 )We had some interesting weather here yesterday. It started at about 4:30 in the morning when a big storm went through and caused a blackout. This site, of course, went down too. It rained and blew and rained some more...and in fact blew down a 256-foot radio tower of a radio station in my town.
Then later that night, about 8:00, it started raining again, and this time decided to hail too. It was reported to be golf-ball sized; I would say moderate marble. Some places nearby got pictures of baseball-sized hail.
Some day I'll get a UPS. Until then, all ye spiders can enjoy my up-and-downtime.
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I'm trying to figure out if it's the network or the motherboard. This machine is rebooting every two hours now, so I guess we'll see. If it keeps going that means it's not locking up, so it's the network.
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( 0 / 0 )I kept running into a strange problem on my "remote" linux machine that runs this very site...it kept losing its network interface. First I made a script to reboot it every hour, which seemed to work. Since it obviously didn't have a bad hardware problem, I began to suspect something else. On a whim, I started a ping in the background:
ping 192.168.0.2&
...which ran continuously for 24 hours...and the network interface didn't drop; the box stayed active. So I slowed it down a bit:
ping 192.168.0.2 -i 60&
...which has been running fine for about 4 hours now. I think, personally, it's the ndiswrapper Windows driver letting the Belkin F5D7050 USB wireless device go to sleep...or something. Running this ping script seems to help it. The next step will be something like this:
ping 192.168.0.2 -i 3600&
...which will issue a ping every hour. I am still fascinated that there is so little smtp traffic on the internet. Maybe I'll post my modification of that Python script at some point.
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