Question about Laptop with Intel Atom CPU

[Morne]

Hi all

OK so I know these things are useless for 3ds max, but can you do anything on it other than email and internet? Can I for example load photoshop onto it? Also why does it come with XP but not with Vista? Does that mean they won't come with Windows 7 either when it's released?

[glyph]

they have xp as it puts much less demand on cpu and graphics

altho Win7 is meant to be an optimised version of Vista I doubt it would run any better

I guess Pshop should run fine for smallish files but a fifty layer monster its not going to be happy about - Pshop ran fine on machines ten years ago !

modern browsers put a considerable load on the cpu.. so browsing is not a trivial load

[Morne]

good to know. I'll mainly use it for what it was meant for. But on the odd day I would like to do some basic photoshop stuff like change colours on a single layer pic etc.

[beestee]

I have one of the early Asus Eee models, and it runs MoI surprisingly well. It is great for travel and/or mobile computing due to size and weight. I use mine pretty much every day to stream music from pandora and do some light web browsing.

[glorybound]

Mini

I have the Acer mini and I love it. Perfect for Netflix and Lynda.com

[Morne]

I have one of the early Asus Eee models, and it runs MoI surprisingly well.

What is MoI?

[Morne]

I really need to know if the thing can do basic photoshop work on single layer maybe 2 layers at the most on images about 4 megapixel. My supplier's direct answer was "I don't know"

Time to change supplier?

[arobbert]

I have an HP Mini 2140 with an Atom 1.6 GHZ and two gigs of RAM Vista home 32 bit. I can run PhotoShop and do edits fine. I tested this with a 7200x5564 pixel image. AutoCAD works fine for viewing files and I'm sure you could do basic edits. I can even run MAX with Vray and it renders fine as a very slow dual core. It works for viewing and manipulating Max files. The main limitation is the tiny 10.1" screen Which doesn't have room for tool bars. This is a really sweet piece of technology I've found very useful.

Units with 2 Gigs of RAM are a bit harder to find but I see this as a bare minimum. At the time I bought this that the most you could get in a Mini.

Hope this helps.

[glorybound]

Mini's

The 2 Gb minis have Vista and the 1 Gb minis have XP so to me it is a wash. Vista needs a Gb of ram just to run.

[beestee]

MoI(http://moi3d.com/) is a 3d nurbs modeling application.

RAM is a pretty big deal with these 'netbooks' as arobbert mentions, because it is shared for graphics. In some cases the RAM is soldered to the motherboard to give device better durability and heat dispersion, so upgrading is not an option on all models. Something you might keep in mind while looking.

[arobbert]

I wasn't crazy about the idea of Vista Home but it's worked out fine.

I don't believe the entire OS is loaded into physical RAM regardless of how much RAM you have so it seems you would still have more RAM left when comparing 1 and 2 Gig with the associated OS. I guess at the end of the day it's splitting hairs anyway. I'm amazed these applications even run on this thing. I do wish they would allow for a bit more RAM though.