Community Matters

Interesting… Asus’ EeePC is basically the hottest selling computer out there, yet Walmart stops selling Linux computers in its stores, including the Everex Cloudbook, which is competing for exactly the same market.

Interestingly enough, they will continue to sell these machines online, but apparently they are not flying off the shelves in the stores so they will disappear from there. I wonder why this experiment failed. Is it a problem with the Everex machines? Is it that Walmart is not exactly attracting the right audience for these computers (I cannot remember the last time I was in a Walmart)? Or is Linux simply the wrong choice of OS for this market segment?

I look forward to seeing more sales numbers for the EeePC, the Cloudbook and some of the other new entries into this market like the Kohjinsha E8 and the yet to be officially announced Compaq 2133.

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I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?

As the number of EeePC-sized machines increases we are seeing more and more comparisons. And the more of them I see, the more I am disturbed about the cluelessness of some reviewers (no offense…).

Look at this comparison of the HP 2133 vs. EeePC 900. Specifically look at the table at the bottom. Green means better. The Via C7-M runs at more than 1GHz, the Intel CPU quoted runs at 900MHz. Argl.

First - I have yet to see any public information on the CPU used in the EeePC 900. And second, as I mentioned before in the Cloudbook vs EeePC 701 comparison, a Via C7-m at twice the frequency is still slightly slower than a Celeron M.

Vista on a machine like the HP 2133 would be seriously painful.

At a press conference at CeBIT in Germany Asus shared more details with the public. So far they are mostly focused on the German (and Austrian) market. The second generation EeePC will come with a T-Mobile Hotspot bundle that gives the user 300 hours of free use of T-Mobile hotspots - so no WIMAX, just a WiFi bundle.

The other bit of news that had been rumored before - primary OS for the new model will be Windows XP. The reports contradict each other regarding the availability of Linux as an option; so maybe the addition of a Microsoft OS is part of the 100 Euro ($150) price hike? Thanks for nothing, Asus. If this gets confirmed we all should start a petition for them to keep selling a Linux version. I don’t want to have to pay for the license to an OS that I certainly won’t use!

Still no information on processor and chipset…

Not a huge surprise, but Asus announced the Gen2 EeePC at CeBIT. All the reports that I’ve seen so far are in German, but they don’t really contain much information, anyway, and in some aspects even contradict each other…

Here’s what we seem to know so far:

• 8.9 inch wide screen with 1024×600 resolution
• 1GB Ram by default (but most people will upgrade that, anyway, right?)
• 8GB or 12GB of SSD (there are some contradictions here)
• higher price (399 instead of 299 Euro - no idea what that will translate into for the US market)

The information that I’m most interested in is missing. Which CPU / chipset? And when can we have it?

I’ll keep looking.

I still haven’t been able to get my hands on a Cloudbook, but the good folks over at NotebookReview.com did and posted a very interesting review of it. Their conclusion:

…upon closer examination it’s clear that VIA and Everex had to make a number of sacrifices to bring this ultra-mobile notebook to the market for such a low price. The low-capacity slow hard drive, and slow overall performance make the CloudBook a less than compelling purchase compared to the current generation Asus Eee PC 4G.

They also report of excessive heat issues and a few other problems (apparently the Cloudbook doesn’t deal well with the small screen size and even has problems when connecting to larger external screens).

What I found most interesting were the benchmarks. Please go to to the NotebooReview.com review for all the details, but here are the highlights as far as I see them: (note, these were done under Windows XP in order to make it easier to compare with other notebooks)

• The PCMark05 scores for the 1.2GHz VIA C7-M based Cloudbook are abysmal. 612 PCMarks (compared to 1132 PCMarks for the 630MHz Intel Celeron M based EeePC).
• The wPrime (32M) time is equally bad: 249 seconds for the Cloudbook vs. 201 seconds for the EeePC.
• And finally, the SSD in the EeePC got to shine. The Cloudbook with its hard drive reached a transfer rate of 18.3 MB/sec with 34ms access time. The SSD in the EeePC is about a third faster in transfer rate (24.3 MB/sec) and of course simply blows aways the disk in the Cloudbook with 0.5ms access time.

I think the benchmarks make it clear - the Cloudbook is painfully slow compared to the EeePC.

Looking forward I can’t wait to see Benchmarks of the rumored second generation EeePC based on the Intel Atom (yep, Intel released the official processor brand for the chip codenamed Silverthorne).

No, this won’t be a real benchmark comparing my PowerMac G5 Dual Core 2.0GHz with my brand new Mac Pro 8-core 2.8GHz. I haven’t spent the time to create hard numbers. But I can give you some subjective impressions.

First, things that are I/O bound are still as slow as they were. Like reading eight gigabytes of photos from the SanDisk Extreme FireWire 800 reader. Or transferring 200+ gigabytes of data from one disk to another. Not surprising, but still… darn.

Second, and much more important - Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS3 just fly on the new box. Especially compute intensive operations that mostly happen in memory (sync the settings of 25 pictures Lightroom; apply filters in Photoshop) - you suddenly see all eight cores busy in MenuMeters and things that took several seconds on the PowerMac are done instantaneously.

Nice - I will post more comparisons later. Promise.

Lately traffic on this blog has gone up quite a bit (more than quadrupled over the last couple of months). And the main driver of all these new visitors? Google.

More than 90% of the readers of this blog come from search now (up from less than 40% in December) and again more than 90% of the search hits come from Google.

Looking at the traffic and at the actual searches that got people to my blog brings some surprising results:

• My own blog is the 162nd hit when you are searching for dirk hohndel blog. WTF?
• When being less specific (searching for hohndel blog) it shows up as the fourth result (and in Google’s defense, two of the three higher ranked results are my blog at work)
• On the other hand this blog is the top result for queries like eeepc competitor or motorola ming leopard.

Which brings me back to the title of this post - even though this is clearly my blog (the posts are authored by “Dirk” and the domain is “Hohndel.org”) and even though I write about lots of things here, most of the people who get here through Google are not looking for me but for information on a small subsets of the topics that I post about. And a change in Google’s ranking (which I can’t really influence, can I?) will completely change the amount of people coming to this site and the topics that they might be interested in. Something to think about.

So besides silly search engine optimization tools - is there an easy way to fix the fact that searching for my name doesn’t get you here? Here’s one idea: if you happen to have a blog or site yourself… would you mind adding a link named “Dirk Hohndel’s blog” which points to the entry page of this blog (so something like <a href=”http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters”>Dirk Hohndel’s blog</a>)? And drop me a line if you did (I’ll happily add a link here in this post back to you). I want to try these searches again in a few weeks and see if the rankings respond…

The good folks over at engadget were talking to Sony Vice President Mike Abary - and in that conversation he apparently decried that devices like the EeePC would create a race to the bottom. Interesting perspective - but it may be slightly influenced by the fact that Sony doesn’t have a competing product and would rather not have to invest into a market segment that could seriously impact it’s ultra-light notebooks.

But instead of complaining about the lack of features (which seems to be implied in this comment), I think Sony should try what HP and Pioneer and others are trying: create a competitively priced product that provides better features and therefore can grab a higher price and maybe even higher margins.

I certainly think we are going to seeing many more products below $500 that don’t go for “cheapest” but for “best value proposition” instead. And for Intel, AMD and Via this is indeed a very interesting market. The margin in their business can be influenced two ways. Higher ASP (unlikely here as the OEMs can’t allow the BOM (bill of materials) to get too high) or lower production cost. That’s where tiny chips like Silverthorne, created on a 45nm process, come into play. If they can be produced sufficiently cheaper compared the current entry level CPUs (like the 65nm based Intel Celeron processor) then it is possible to have a similar or even better margin percentage, even if the resulting chip carries a lower sticker price. Via already announced their next generation Isaiah processor (still on 65nm, though) which will compete in this market, and I am sure that once AMD can produce its Geode processors on 45nm, they will see better margins from that, too.

I love a good story - but this one I’m kind of skeptical of… guryhwa even posts some pictures of upgrading his EeePC with an Intel Pentium M, but the part where he says “soldering is complicated but interesting” seems to be understating the problem a bit. And he doesn’t have a picture with the CPU removed, only a picture of what looks to be a Pentium M ULV 753 on the Asus motherboard.

Call me unfair, but I somewhat doubt that this is really what happened - the labeling on the CPU is easy enough to create with Photoshop, same for the BIOS screen; much easier than the soldering work that would be required to do this.

But maybe he’ll post a few more pictures of the process to convince skeptics like me? It would be the coolest EeePC hack, ever.

This seems to be a surprisingly frequent question - at least if I consider how often this or one of its permutation ends up being a search term than lands people on this blog.

So here’s the simple answer. When you set up you EeePC you are asked to set a password for your account. That same password is the root password. So for the Asus / Xandros OS there isn’t really a default password; you set it yourself.

If you are running EeeDora on your EeePC, then the install script sets a default password of eeedora. My recommendation would be to change that right away…