[aarontech] look at this post I did on netbooks to freedom scientific! Warning! It! Is! Looong! And! spammyyy!!!
- From: "Valiant8086" <valiant8086@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <aarontech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 23:06:31 -0500
here goes, sent this overview of my view of netbooks to a guy at fs a while
ago, had too much time on my recliner, but figured I'd might as well send the
product of all that typing somewhere else too..
Hi.
On tigerdirect.com, the 901 is the same price as the 904. exact same price 349
dollars. The other difference is the 904's 160gb hard drive as apose to the
901's 12 gb solid state drive. Should note the 904 is pretty fast, it boots up
very quickly and reboots from ready to go to ready to go in a snap. It's verry
un-netbook-like. I'm not sure what's involved but in some ways it out-performs
my sony vaio, which is a core2duo 1.6ghz with the same size hard drive. And of
course it runs laps around the vaio in all counts if the vaio happens to be
running vista, which I generally boot up into xp so I'll skip that. Can't feel
the asus 904's hard drive spinning, absolutely no way to tell if it's turned on
or not as it generally doesn't need the fan either. that is, no way unless you
have a hearing aid or two that have a t-coil, where you can turn t-coil and get
your head up close to listen for electromagnetic interfeerance from the cpu
and such.
I had the acer aspire 1 with the 120gb hard drive and the 3 cell battery. Same
shelf price as this asus but only 3 cells as apose to 6, and the acer's hard
drive vibrates a bit, and you can feel it kinda bump a little when you're
booting it up or what ever and the hard drive's going all over the place. plus
of course jaws wouldn't register properly on the acer. I tried everything. I
couldn't hibernate on the acer as it would cause jaws to lose video and it kept
coming unregistered. I tried to figure out what made the hardware ID change,
but found it just randomly change, even while it were sitting still on a desk,
with me doing nothing but running jaws enough to go check about for the lockin
code, pressing escape, and going back to that again without doing anything
else. I discovered the lockin code would change from time to time by just doing
that. I was totally unable to figure out what it was doing to cause the lockin
code to change.. I did notice the number only changed between two different
numbers. I tried hard to register both lockin codes, but it didn't work that
way. What ever I did just got me nowhere. So I just took it back, and i'm glad
I did, i'm much better off now, even if I discount the jaws issues.
I definitely prefer this asus. It's somehow faster, even with the same specs
except a 40gb larger hard drive for the exact same price. I did get to look at
an hp minny the other day, but was on a tight time schedule so didn't get to
play with it any. It's keys really are very neatly done. If anything It struck
me that they might actually be bigger than the keys on my sony vaio, which has
a 13.1inch screen and weighs 5 pounds. I can't wait to go back and run a screen
reader on that hp minny to see how it stacks up against the other ones I've
tried. The asus's keyboard is a bit of a challenge, primarily in that it's
right shift key is placed to the right of up arrow, and thus above the right
arrow key. It's a small normal sized button just the same size as the up arrow
key. I of course tend to hit up arrow+A for capital A instead of right
shift+a. I'm getting better at it though, just have to stretch the right pinky
finger a bit more. Acer did a better job in that respect in that they gave a
regular shift key, and squished the arrow keys in where they're supposed to be
by dropping them down into a cut out square like, so they hang down from the
bottom of the keyboard if that makes sence, and those arrow buttons are very
small. Makes playing topspeed sort of difficult but it was better than missing
right shift key all the time.
You didn't ask for a gnovel in fact you didn't ask for anything but ah well
I've got the time.
I wouldn't grab one with only a 3 or 4 cell battery, as the whole point of my
netbook is the amazing battery life, up to 7.2 hours on only a 6 cell battery,
in a snazzy looking package that's easy to chuck, yes I said chuck, into my
backpack, and looks nice with my brailliant32 sitting right up against the palm
rest with no cables strung all over god's creation. that actuaally is a huge
plus, the palm rest being smaller lets the braille display's cells get closer
to the keyboard. That and the brailliant 32's support for running upside down,
so the braille cells are closer to the laptop that way.
One other point is I bought this really small bluetooth USB adapter that is so
tiny it only sticks out of the USB port about a quarter inch. I'm comfortable
leaving that in there and shoving this netbook into my backpack such that it
sits down right on top of that adapter. I'm not worried about it breaking, it
doesn't stick out far enough to get enough leverage to have anything done to
it. That, and it only cost 29 dollars, from office depot. Heh office depot is
selling the acer netbook and the hp minny too, out of interest. The one from
office depot is pretty accessible. The bluetooth adapter I mean. I snagged some
stuff from mom's cell phone with it, and set up a bluetooth headset I bought.
Then I set power options on the netbook so that it won't shut off when I close
the lid. The headset has some basic media buttons. When I want to listen to fs
cast or blindcooltech.com or some other random podcast, I can just turn that
headset on, it beeps at me (got it from AT&T store fyi, and it shows up on the
netbook as a new sound card. Jaws switches along with windows automatically to
the USB headset, I close the lid and tuck the netbook under my arm, or what
ever. if I put it on max battery and set the super power engine thing to power
saver the processor only runs at 621mhz, makeing a situation where I sincerely
believe I could stuff it in a backpack and zip it up air tight, and not cause
the netbook to get too hot. Plus if the lid is shut the screen is off, that
saves about 20 to 30 minutes of battery power. Doing that you can listen to
podcasts for nearly 7 hours, and that's the closer to 7 hours than 6. Don't
forget to turn wireless off, that'll give another 30 minutes. Oh and you can
turn the camera off too, and the touch pad. I hate touch pads. I haven't
figured out a keystroke to toggle touch pad yet, the acer does have a keystroke
to do this. With the asus you have to go into the mouse dialogue box in control
pannel and press a button on the last tab in that multi-paged dialogue.
Ok how was that, you had to take a vacation to read that email.
That's what I do, experiment with stuff and am glad to tell everyone what I
think about it afterwards. That's one reason I'm on the jaws beta testing
team.-----
Oh one thing, since we're talking abobut brailliant 32, and useing it with
bluetooth on the netbook and how convenient it is.
I ran into a problem with it that would be so sweet if we could resolve. The
brailliant 32 uses an emulated cereal port, either way you connect it, be that
bluetooth USB or a real physical cereal port. So when I installed the
brailliant's drivers into jaws I selected com 11, which was the port that the
bluetooth manager told me to use when I wanted to instruct my software to
connect to that bluetooth device. It works fine but when I'm in class listening
to my teacher and useing the netbook and the display to take notes quietly
without the need for headphones. Let's deviate for just a minute, I generally
used headphones but that results in my having to try to listen to both the
teacher and the computer through the headphones. I've got hearing aids and have
to fiddle with switches in order to be able to hear either the teacher or the
computer. It's possible to listen to the headphones and the teacher both at
once, but one typically drowns out the other so someone's not going to be
understood. This makes the 3000 dollar brailliant32 a rather convenient
addition to my backpack.
So back on track again, my netbook would be set on max battery, we want to save
as much battery as possible, and you don't notice the latency you get by
running at only 621mhz through braille. You can painfully hear it with speech,
but braille just hopps marily along and doesn't much care about that stuff. So
on max battery, the netbook was by default set to go on stand by after 2
minutes. this is good, if the teacher's yapping about something I don't need to
type into my notes I don't need to eat some of that precious battery power. The
problem is, when we hibernate, brailliant 32 loses connection to bluetooth, and
up comes the brailliant's menu, where you can read status and configure your
connection type and such. not a big deal. Until you try to bring the netbook
back up to resume typeing into your notes. Brailliant continues to display it's
status menu, and you don't have speech since you muted sound. You have to
blindly kill jaws with insert+f4, enter, then you have to go to run, and run
jaws 100. Jaws will pick the brailliant's connection up and things are fine,
until you go into stand by again. I think jaws really needs to be able to
re-connect my brailliant when I wake back up. The drivers are provided by
humanware themselves but I'm not sure it's their drivers only that come into
play with this limitation. Could jaws somehow repeatedly ask for a braille
display while it runs without hurting performance any? Just say hey any braille
displays out there? Oh hi brailliant, welcome on! That would be brailliant, er,
I mean brilliant. Because right now it takes a pretty lucky chance to be able
to re-connect your braille while in the middle of class, or you can turn speech
on and have jaws (I'll quote Jonathan's FS-Cast way of saying this "babbling
on") and interrupt the teacher, and the students go "wo that thing is talking!"
"Jees I can't understand it!" and all that. It's a general pain in the (insert
word of choice here). My solution was set my lovely netbook's max battery power
scheme to never go on stand by, just turn hard drive and screen off at 1
minute, and never hibernate either. This seams to work but heh just wanted to
point the issue out, is there a way to break that problem?
Hmm I seriously need to shut up and go to bed.
Knight, and talk to you later.
Regards:
aaron T. Spears
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