Windows 7 Discount Sale - Screaming Deal - Netbook Operating System

Unbelievable: you can grab up to 3 Windows 7 licences with over 50% discount, no joke!!!

Dear friends, no matter whether you own a netbook, a laptop or a normal deskop/tower pc. You got the chance to get a Windows 7 Home Premium licence for just $50 (USD) at Amazon or a Windows 7 Professional for just $100 (USD) hurry up since the offer is valid only until July 11th (2009) ”or while supplies last” for U.S., Canada and Japan (start on July 5th).
No joke! Today Microsoft started the so called "screaming deal", you can preorder a copy of Windows 7 update for less than half of the price, unbelievable!

Just to let you understand how much you can save with the pre-order, this is the regular price starting October 2009:

Windows 7 Edition	Upgrade	Full license
Home Premium	$120	$200
Professional	$200	$300
Ultimate	$220	$320

Again: for a Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade you save over 50%, you pay just $50!!

A similar offer will be available in the next few weeks in Europe (United Kingdom, France, Germany), starting July 15th.

I already installed a copy of Windows 7 RC1, it is fantastic. My feeling is that Windows 7 is much more responsive and quick than Vista. The net is full of videos of netbook (EEE PC, MSI Wind and Samsung NC10) running the Windows 7 beta, the performance level is about the same that you get with Windows XP.

When looking at the Windows 7 offer, I just saw that Office 2007 Home and Student got to really cheap level, below $80 USD.

Netbook on the Beach/Outdoor: Display Glare vs Matt

Do you want to use your netbook outdoor? On the beach? Do you wear white shirts?

Be careful with the display type you got: there are basically two types of displays out there.
The "traditional" matte displays and glossy (also called glare) displays.
Glossy displays are said to provide better color intensity and contrast ratios than those with a matte finish. The primary disadvantage of these displays is their tendency to reflect any external light, often resulting in an undesirable glare.
Effect that you don't have with matte displays: while matte displays distribute the reflected light across a large area, glare displays tend to reflect the light source as is.

My rule of thumb: if you use a netbook primarily outdoor, get a netbook with a matte display with a brightness exceeding 160 cd/m2, better if 200 cd/m2 or more. Glare displays are still ok if they have a very good brigthness (200 cd/m2 or more).

It means that the best netbook for the beach (IMHO) are currently:
All MSI Wind, Akoya E1210 and E1211, Samsung NC10, HP Mininote.
Unfortunately the EEE PC tend to have a very dark display, so you won't have much fun outdoor/on the beach.

One very important note: the netbooks that I mentioned above aren't ruggered, it means that they aren't build to be protected from water, dust, sand, dirt, snow and extreme temperatures. For this reason I would never bring my netbook on the beach, it would dramatically reduce its lifetime!!!
Bottom line: handle your netbook with care.

Netbook: SSD vs Hard Disk

-->See also: How to boost netbook performance

In the early time of netbooks you could find a lot of SSD as unique netbook storage type, one of the main reason for very poor performance of the early netbooks/EEE PC. Nowadays most of the netbooks are equipped with 2,5-inch hard disks, giving you much more space and more performance.
--> See also Netbook database
SSD (Solid State Disks) don't necessarily mean "low performance", actually there are SSDs that got much higher performance than traditional hard drives (see below).
Be careful if you want to replace your netbook hard disk with a SSD: high performacen SSDs are currently very expensive (e.g. more than 400 USD for 32GB) and cheap SSD got often bad write performance and/or high power consumption.
The two best SSD out there are Intel X-25 E and Samsung PB22-J however are very costly and even not easy to get.
Solidata K6 seems to be very promising (32GB, about 140 USD) , at least from the datasheet: sequential read 200MB/sec, sequential write 160MB/sec. Power consumption: 0.3 W idle, Max 2W. I'll keep you updated...

SSD vs HDD
The SSD promise superior performance and lower power consumption. Big advantage for the SSDs is the absence of parts in movement: while performance of traditional hard drives are strictly related to disc spin speed, data density and physical position of the data speed. SSD performance are mainly limited by used flash technology and interface controller. On the other hand these SSDs are actually very costly (more than $400 for 32GB). In any case I bet that SSDs are going to completely replace HDD (Hard Disk Drives) whithin four to five years. Just the time to get high performance SSDs below the 100 USD mark...
Interesting article from tomshardware on SSD vs HDD

Some data on SSD vs HDD performance
Let's compare best in class SDD Intel X-25 E and Samsung PB22-J vs best in class 3,5-inch desktop hard disks Wester Digital VelociRaptor VR150 and Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, data from actual tomshardware charts
Max read throughput: SSD 207-220MB/sec vs 121-131MB/sec for the HDDs
Max read throughput: SSD 187-205MB/sec vs 121-131MB/sec for the HDDs
Read access time: SDD 0.1 ms vs 7-10 ms for the HDD, it means that factor 70-100x improvement!!!
Source: tomshardware storage charts

--> See also: How to boost netbook performance

A few SSDs from Amazon:

Android Netbooks: Asus EEE PC, Acer Aspire One

Acer and Asus representatives at the Computex confirmed that the first netbooks with Google Android operating systems are expected for end of 2009, beginning 2010.
Actually this is something I already "predicted", see also my post on Netbook CPU and Operating Systems for 2009 and 2010

Acer Aspire One 110: top netbook for small price!

Can you imagine, the netbook bestseller 2008, Acer Aspire One 8.9-inch display for less than 250 US dollars???
Acer Aspire One AOA110-1834 8.9-Inch Copper Netbook - 3 Cell Battery at the time of writing for only $238.99 (Amazon)!!!

Main characteristics are the 8.9 display and the good keyboard. The little price is due to the market shift towards 10-inch display and because of the new Acer Aspire One D150, a good 10-inch netbook for about $350 US dollars: for example Acer Aspire One AOD150-1669 10.1-Inch Seashell White Netbook - 6 Cell Battery
for $345.99 US dollars (Amazon).

In the meantime a surprice from MSI: the MSI Wind U100 for about $300 UD dollars (with only 3-cells battery) MSI Wind U100-641US 10-Inch Black Netbook - 3 Cell Battery

Atom N270 (N280) vs Via Nano Benchmarks

In a recent article (review of the Samsung NC20) the important German magazine c´t confirmed what I'm saying since long time: from a performance point of view Intel Atom and VIA Nano are absolutely comparable, they achieve a similar performance level, especially if compared to available netbook processors.
For details see Intel Atom N270 vs VIA Nano vs Core 2 Duo vs Pentium M Benchmarks Performance

What c´t says (free translation, I'm not a professional translator...):
VIA Nano's new microarchitecture is a big improvement especially compared to VIA C7. This is confirmed by the CineBench R10: here the VIA Nano achieves double as much points as the C7.
... without HyperThreading the Intel Atom is much slower than the VIA Nano, even enabling HyperThreading the VIA Nano achieves better benchmarks results (Nano: 886, Atom: 843)

On the other hand, thanks to HyperThreading, the Intel Atom Windows system is more responsive than the VIA Nano Windows in case an application generates a high CPU load.
...With respect to CPU power both VIA Nano and Intel Atom can't compete with mature notebook processors.
...The Samsung NC20 doesn't have enough horse power to handle the user's manual: many seconds are required to leaf through it.

Bottom line: both Intel Atom and VIA Nano are low end processors, ok only if you want to use your netbook for email, casual Internet browsing and basic multimedia (MP3, video). If you want to do more buy a notebook with a decent CPU!!!!

Benchmark (CineBench R10) numbers

• VIA C7 at 1.6GHz: 406 points
• VIA Nano U2250 1.3-1.5GHz (in the Samsung NC20) : 886 points
• Intel Atom N270 (Hyper Threading not used): 545 points.
  
• Intel Atom N270 (Hyper Threading used): 843 points
• Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 (single core mode): more than 3000 points
• Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 (dual core mode): almost 6000 points

Intel Atom N270 vs N280: I don't have right now CineBench benchmarks for Atom N280, on the other hand I expect basically the same results that we got for the N270.

See also Intel Atom N270 vs VIA Nano vs Core 2 Duo vs Pentium M Benchmarks Performance

Intel Atom N270 (N280) vs Via Nano Performance

I reposted the article

See

• Intel Atom N270 (N280) vs Via Nano Performance
  
• Intel Atom N270 vs VIA Nano vs Core 2 Duo vs Pentium M Benchmarks Performance

DVD burner for EEE PC and any netbook, why not?

In a world with Internet flat rates, tons of gigabytes in hard disks, USB memory sticks and flash cards you don't have to burn DVD so frequently. However especially if you aren't a power user a DVD player/burner is an essential piece of hardware. DVD are especially handy to back up and restore the hard disk, not to speak about playing out music/movies from your private CD/DVD collection.
Netbooks and subnotebooks typically miss a DVD burner, especially for space reasons. The EEE PCs are not an exception. The new Asus SDRW-08D1S-U DVD records on 8X DVD+R, 8X DVD+RW, 6X DVD-R and 5X DVD-RAM and access 8X DVD-ROM and 5X DVD-RAM formats. While obviously designed with the EEE PC in mind, the Asus DVD burner can be used on MSI Wind, Samsung NC10 or any other netbook. You just plug it to the USB port(s), while for the player functionality you don't need of installing any software, for burning DVDs you typically need some software. Asus ships the burner in bundle with Cyberlink Power2Go 6 LE.

Xandros Linux on ARM - When on first ARM Netbook?

Very interesting news: Xandros has been ported to ARM, we'll soon see EEE PC with an ARM processor?Link to the article: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2075296337.html

See also chart of 2009-2010 netbook processors and operating systems

"Xandros is porting its desktop Linux distribution -- noted for use in the pioneering Asus EEE netbook -- to two ARM-based platforms for netbooks and other mobile devices. The ports are part of a larger push to support ARM-based devices, including 3G-enabled MID-like devices and even smartphones, says Xandros.

The two Xandros ports are to the Qualcomm Snapdragon and netbook-focused Freescale i.MX515. The ports will include "a variety" of user applications, and will support both keyboard and touchscreen input, says Xandros. Applications are said to include a browser, push-based email, PIM, instant messaging, a photo viewer, a media player, and a Microsoft Office-compatible office suite."

Kindle 2 on sale/pre order at Amazon.com

A little off-topic here, however there is a major news: the new Kindle 2 can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com and will be shipped end of February.
I must say the after looking around in the Kindle Store I understand the reason for the big sales success: I'm impressed from the big selection of books and magazines and especially the low price tag. If you are a "power reader" the saving is considerable, you pay:

• $9.99 for new books
• $9.99-$13.99 monthly for newspapers (it means $0,30 to $0,50 per issue!)
• $1.50 for magazines

You can download any time the book/issue you want via 3G wireless, of course you don't pay the data transfer.
Some features of the new Kindle :

Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines

Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback
Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots
Books in Under 60 Seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images
Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging
More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books
Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns
Read-to-Me: With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you
Large Selection: Over 230,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available
Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

Netbook Buyer guide update with ExpressCard and High Speed Wifi search

I already presented the EEE Netbook database, now I've added the possibility to refine the search for netbooks on sale with ExpressCard, high speed Wifi (WLAN draft n) support and a weight limit.
Direct link to the EEE Netbook database/finder

Some examples:

• find 10-inch netbook with high capacity battery and ExpressCard
• any netbook with ExpressCard and weight below 1000gr
• 10-inch netbook below 1000gr and high speed wifi (draft n)i
  

Atom N280 shipping with GN40 Chipset

Intel started shipping the new Atom N280 together with the GN40 chipset. Both N280 and GN40 aren't mentioned at all in Intel website.
Intel deleted the the confidential document with first official information on CPU clock 1,66GHz (just 0,06 GHz more) and bus of 533MHz while news sites worldwide talk about 667MHz FSB.

In any case, we'll see very soon the first Atom N280 netbooks. Asus and others already announced the first models.

GN40 vs 945GSE: voice say that the (compared to the 945GSE) the FN will have much better 3D performance and will be able to play high video (blue ray). On the other hand, according to unofficial information, the Atom N280+GN40 should be slightly less power efficient.

GN40 vs Nvidia Ion: I doubth that the GN40 will outperform the Ion in 3D performance, Intel doesn't have a big 3D tradition however who knows...

In any case you know what I mean about 3D performance and benchmarks for netbooks: I'm sure that 3D games are not of interest for the vast majority of netbook users! Who really cares about 3D benchmarks for netbooks? If you want to play 3D games you won't be happy with a netbook, the display is far too small and the processor isn't that powerful...

Other posts on Intel Atom

Netbook Processors and Operating Systems for 2009-2010

Relevant posts

• posts on Apple / Leopard OS on netbooks
• posts on Atom processor
• posts on VIA Nano processor
• posts on dual core processors for netbooks

Netbooks/mini laptops represent now a significant part of the overall IT market, million unit of EEE PC, Aspire One, Samsung NC10 and MSI Wind were sold in weeks.
The netbook race started and in the next 6months to one year we'll see new processors and I bet also the first Android netbooks. The figure shows a possible scenario of operating systems and processors used in netbooks for 2009-2010.

1) Netbook processors
The vast majority of netbooks shipped today are equipped with Intel Atom processor, VIA C7 and Celeron netbooks are almost not shipped anymore.
A lot is moving in the netbook processors segment: we already saw netbooks mounting a MIPS processor, the first VIA Nano netbooks are coming in weeks and a bunch of ARM based netbooks are under development (see below). Voices say that also Apple is developing an own processor (ARM based).

Available Netbook Processors

• Intel Celeron, Atom, Core
• AMD Geode
  
• VIA Nano, C7
• Ingenic JZ4740 (MIPS based)
  

Netbook Processors 2009-2010

• x86 compatible: Intel Atom (single and dual core), Intel Core, VIA Nano (single and dual core), AMD Neo, Godson 3 (?)
  
• ARM based: Qualcomm Snapdragon, Freescale i.MX515, ZiiLabs ZMS-05, Apple (?)
  
• MIPS based: Ingenic JZ4740, Godson 3(?)

To be noted that Godson 3 processor is built on top of MIPS cores however implements x86 compatibility.

2) Netbook operating systems
While Microsoft Windows well supports x86 compatible processors, ARM and MIPS based processors aren't supported by Windows XP/Vista/7 and I don't think that the situation will change very soon unless ARM and MIPS processors will get a big success in the netbook market. It is also true that ARM and MIPS are already supported by Windows Mobile, however I don't think that Microsoft will let Windows Mobile and Windows 7 compete in the netbook segment.
In any case ARM and MIPS are omnipresent in portable devices and got a very good Linux support.
The Linux community is very active, the first netbook optimized distributions are coming our (e.g. Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Intel Moblin 2)
Google Android targets mobile devices (e.g. mobile phone), nevertheless I don't see a reason why not to use Android on netbooks as well. It means that the effort spent to port Android on ARM and MIPS platforms may enable an easy porting of Android on ARM and MIPS netbooks.
Apple excuse for not entering the netbook market is that actual netbook processors don't offer enough performance. Apple is waiting for next generation of netbook processors (or his own processor) to present the first "iNetbook" of course running MAC OS / Leopard.

Relevant posts

• posts on Apple / Leopard OS on netbooks
• posts on Atom processor
• posts on VIA Nano processor
• posts on dual core processors for netbooks

Apple Netbook/Mini Laptop? Not with Atom N270 or Nano Processor

Short update: in a conference call Tim Cook explicitely said that Apple won't build a netbook/mini laptop with this generation of processors (i.e. Intel Atom N270 and VIA Nano).
According to Apple, current processors are too slow, not sufficient for a good customer experience.
Let's see whether a dual core Atom or next generation of Intel Atom (Pineview, with integrated graphics and memory controller) will have sufficient performance, according to Apple.

To be noted that what Tim Cook said could be an answer to what an Intel executive said a few months ago (iPhone internet browsing is slow because of the ARM processor), furthermore there are rumors of Apple being developing an own processor, to be used in Apple Netbooks. It means that Apple may enter the market with an own processor and is already starting the marketing campain saying that current processors are too slow...

Relevant posts

• posts on Apple / Leopard OS on netbooks
• posts on Netbook performance
• posts on Atom processor
• posts on VIA Nano processor
• posts on dual core processors for netbooks
  

Intel Atom N270 vs VIA Nano vs Core 2 Duo vs Pentium M Benchmarks for Netbook Performance

I see much confusion when comparing Intel Atom and VIA Nano performance: the VIA Nano processor performs slightly better in number crunching (single thread) benchmarks, again SLIGHTLY! It doesn't mean that a netbook running VIA Nano processors are faster, not at all. Actually the opposite is true in some use cases! Especially with multi-threading applications.

I tell you something: having an Atom or a Nano processor won't influcence that much performance as you can with 1-2 GB RAM and a fast hard disk or SDD.

I personally consider current Intel Atom N270 and VIA Nano processors at the same performance level, little below Pentium M and far below Core 2 Duo processors.
I prepared a couple of charts showing the performance difference Atom/Nano vs Pentium M and Core 2 Duo processors.
The first chart shows SPECint_rate_base2006 and SPECfp_rate_base2006 for

• Intel Atom N270
• VIA Nano N2100
  
• Pentium M 780
• Core 2 Duo T7800
• Core 2 Duo T9500

As you see there is a huge CPU performance difference between the netbook, "low end" processors (Intel Atom/VIA Nano) and more Intel processors that you find in notebook since years.

The core efficiency can be also seen if you consider the benchmark figures divided by GHz and number of cores. This is what I show in next chart: Pentium M and especially Core 2 Duo are far more efficient than Atom and Nano. Of course we didn't expect something different since Atom and Nano are designed for low cost/low performance and especially low power designs.

See also

• popular post on Atom Performance vs Core Duo vs VIA C7
• other posts on Intel Atom Processor
• other posts on VIA Nano Processor