Why Eee?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 10:34:17AM -0500, Giles Orr wrote:
> The latest Walmart flyer I received has an ad for an Acer laptop:
> 15.4" widescreen, 1 Gb RAM, 80 Gb HD and $398.88.  I couldn't find it
> on their website.  Processor and optical drive unstated, but I imagine
> it has both :-) .  It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic.  The point
> is, despite obvious(?) deficiencies (probably a Celeron processor - or
> AMD if you're lucky, but it must run at over 1 GHz) and a
> substantially greater weight, the price is the same as the Eee and the
> horsepower and screen are hugely better.  I think the Eee, the OLPC,
> and the now defunct Classmate can take the credit for bringing us
> laptops this cheap, but I would prefer this Acer over one of them,
> even if I had to discard Vista and install Linux myself.  If the Eee
> had hit their original target price of $200 we would have had a
> different battle - but they didn't.

Well most likely the Eee has longer batery life, much faster boot time,
is much more durable, and takes up a lot less space in a bag.  At least
I would expect so.

As for the walmart thing, it appears it is an Acer AS5315 with a Celeron
M 530 (can't quite find that for sure) and an intel 960GML chipset.
Wireless is apparently atheros AR5007EG, which is not currently
supported by linux.  Apparently someone is working on adding support to
the madwifi atheros HAL for it, but that could take a while, and my
experience with the atheros HAL has not been anything I would want to do
again, so I would consider it a laptop with no wifi at all if you are
running linux.

--
Len Sorensen
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