Got one of these during my second year of uni. Couldn't afford a full blown laptop, this handled the job good enough for me. I was able to read class notes, do some coursework on it when the lab was full. Even got it run a LAMP stack for some coursework. I still have this in my loft space, I just can't bare to get rid of devices.
Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
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Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#152I've had "Eee PC" / Netbook for many years as my travel entertainment companion. I still have and use for the same purpose their newer thin and tiny Laptop (forgot what it is called) which is essentially netbook in anything but name
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#153The eee PC was also the original netbook used for the "booting Linux in five seconds" presentation at the first Linux Plumbers Conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ That presentation inspired a whole wave of boot optimizations across the industry, that recalibrated the expectations for what "boot fast" meant. If you look at some systems at the time, "boots in 30 seconds" was a selling point . Today, you can re…
> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase. What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep…
This +1.
I have a similar setup and it definitely takes upwards of 20s for a cold boot. Though like mentioned above, I don't really do cold boots that often and my average uptime is about a 20 days (mostly rebooting to apply updates).
My guess is that doing proper power on self test (POST) stuff will always add a delay (having multiple network ports and 128G of RAM does not help).
Though a lot of modern OSes like Windows just cheat by hibernating instead of properly shutting down, so they can save on the time to load up stuff like drivers.
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#154I'm actually surprised people have such good memories of these horrible things. Perhaps I missed something. If the iPad grew out of Netbooks then it's like it junked its own DNA and stole some good stuff from somewhere else.
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then it's not booting. Waking up from sleep/hibernation has always been fast.
Would you call "booting" what Windows does with Fast Startup enabled, then? It is half resume from a hibernation image (kernel and system services), half going through the regular booting process (rest of userland).
Probably not. Certainly not a true cold boot.
Anytime Windows does big "reboot-required" updates, the fast boot thing doesn't apply anymore and it can take considerably longer due to the forced cold boot.
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#156Those are the OG-Netbooks!
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#157I still have my Eee PC [1]. Haven't used it in forever and a day, but it was awesome at the time, especially with the EeePC specific linux distros that were available at the time.
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#158This is a great opportunity to remind everyone about the extremely negative dampening effects Micro$oft has had on innovation in both hardware and operating systems.
It's a monopoly and should have been broken up. We still can barely find OEM-installed Linux laptops, and an entity the size of Dell or Asus could easily float their own distro or add support dollar$ to an existing one.
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#159I'm actually surprised people have such good memories of these horrible things. Perhaps I missed something. If the iPad grew out of Netbooks then it's like it junked its own DNA and stole some good stuff from somewhere else.
I mean they really weren't that bad back in the day, though I would say they're probably the antithesis of something like an iPad.
I had a Lenovo S10 netbook (Atom N270, WinXP, 1G RAM, 160G HDD) that I used from high school to the first years of college and it was actually great for everything I needed it to do -- writing code and reading documentation -- and never broke a sweat. I did Perl, Java (Swing & Android dev), JavaScript, PHP, C++, and Flash/ActionScript development and dual booted Linux (Fedora).
The thing I really appreciated was that even though it was really cheap -- cheap enough that as a high school student I had my own laptop instead of having to share the family computer -- it did everything any other bigger laptop could do. I had both WiFi and Bluetooth (which could not be taken for granted back in the day), an SD card reader, mic and headphone jacks, and even a PCMCIA slot!
Sure, netbooks were not _better_ at anything compared to a laptop, but they also largely didn't have any hard limitations. It allowed anyone to just dive deep in and tinker and customize. On the contrary, an iPad (especially those first & second generation ones) was no more than an appliance like a toaster or fridge. It had a fixed set of things it could do, and anything outside of it was impossible.
Heck, if I was to only have _one_ computing device today and had to choose between current model iPad and a nearly two decade old netbook, I'd take the netbook any day. An iPad is doomed to forever be a secondary device, but a netbook, should you be so willing, can be your primary computer.
Re: Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t really have to reboot my M1 ever (short of updates), so booting is more or less equal to flipping open the screen.
But then it's not booting. Waking up from sleep/hibernation has always been fast.
Sleep/hibernation was always horribly bugged is my memory. Fast, maybe, but still horrible.