## Saturday, June 27, 2009

### Windows 7 Discount Sale - Screaming Deal - Netbook Operating System

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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

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UPDATE: I created an updated list of best netbooks with matte display
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.
UPDATE: I created an updated list of best netbooks with matte display

## Sunday, June 7, 2009

### Netbook: SSD vs Hard Disk

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-->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:

## Tuesday, June 2, 2009

### Android Netbooks: Asus EEE PC, Acer Aspire One

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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
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