"Why Chromebook Pundits Are Out of Touch"

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by sl42

I believe the 4GB 720C non-touchscreen has 16GB SSD plus the SDHC slot
which would allow for 32GB additional storage. I'd probably just use a
fast SD card for additional storage -- possibly even put my home partition
on the SD and leave the SSD for root and swap partitions. If I need any
more room than that, that's what the 500GB external HDD sitting next to me
is for ;-)

I suppose that would work, but it could start getting expensive on the HDD if you start installing a bunch of stuff. 16GB is not a lot for root+swap, and internal is much better performance.

That really is the chief problem with Chromebooks IMO -- and only a problem if you intend to use it as the hardware for some other *nix.

[sl42]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I suppose that would work, but it could start getting expensive on the HDD if you start installing a bunch of stuff. 16GB is not a lot for root+swap, and internal is much better performance.

That really is the chief problem with Chromebooks IMO -- and only a problem if you intend to use it as the hardware for some other *nix.

For just root and swap 16GB is overkill by far. A full Ubuntu desktop with every oddball tool I might ever wind up using would not fill six gigs, and a leaner install with Xubuntu (which is what I'm using now) could fit in half of that. There'd be a ton of wasted space if you assume a 4GB or even 8GB swap partition.

[sl42]

But yea, the downside is using the SD card for storage which is slower than that fancy SSD. Though I'm not sure how much slower than a normal HDD since I haven't done any research yet on SD card classes and speeds - but if SD storage isn't any slower than the current disk spinning away under my keyboard in reasonably priced versions then I'd be fine with that. I just like the idea of a nice fast Linux machine for under $300 that can do the kinds of tricks my current computer just can't: like launch Calibre in under five minutes, or stream video while anything else is going on on the system, or let me actually have more than eight to ten browser tabs open without bogging down to a completely unresponsive state. Or be able to run Unity or Gnome at all without being entirely unusable.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by sl42

For just root and swap 16GB is overkill by far. A full Ubuntu desktop with every oddball tool I might ever wind up using would not fill six gigs, and a leaner install with Xubuntu (which is what I'm using now) could fit in half of that. There'd be a ton of wasted space if you assume a 4GB or even 8GB swap partition.

That arch linux threatening warning about reserving at least 10 GB for /var alone (for pacman cache) is probably still on my mind. Now that I spend a few seconds thinking about it (don't laugh, I had dental surgery this morning -- gotta love wisdom teeth) that shouldn't usually be a problem. I suppose it all depends on just what you have. Also, my HDD has more than its fair share of stuff, I suppose, since I have multiple desktops installed.

That being said, I don't particularly want a lean desktop, and I don't want to rely on an external HDD for everything other than the barebones OS. That SSD upgrade would be a must for me.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by sl42

But yea, the downside is using the SD card for storage which is slower than that fancy SSD. Though I'm not sure how much slower than a normal HDD since I haven't done any research yet on SD card classes and speeds - but if SD storage isn't any slower than the current disk spinning away under my keyboard in reasonably priced versions then I'd be fine with that. I just like the idea of a nice fast Linux machine for under $300 that can do the kinds of tricks my current computer just can't: like launch Calibre in under five minutes, or stream video while anything else is going on on the system, or let me actually have more than eight to ten browser tabs open without bogging down to a completely unresponsive state. Or be able to run Unity or Gnome at all without being entirely unusable.

My current computer may have yours beat.

It is 10+ years old, and still exists purely as an experiment in reviving oldness.

Somehow I manage to run MATE and cinnamon without it being totally unusable.

calibre loads in ~40s and I have at least 40 tabs open.

The only thing I upgraded was the RAM. Started with 256 MB and has 2 GB now.

Streaming video seems to be a problem solely because Flash has a violent disagreement with my system/hardware/something -- and I don't care enough to try fixing it.

[sl42]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

My current computer may have yours beat.

It is 10+ years old, and still exists purely as an experiment in reviving oldness.

Somehow I manage to run MATE and cinnamon without it being totally unusable.

calibre loads in ~40s and I have at least 40 tabs open.

The only thing I upgraded was the RAM. Started with 256 MB and has 2 GB now.

Streaming video seems to be a problem solely because Flash has a violent disagreement with my system/hardware/something -- and I don't care enough to try fixing it.

My current machine is a Gateway LT4004U - and the only time in my life
that I've experienced a major reversal in Moore's law. It's a dual core
Atom N2600 @ 1.6Ghz with 1GB ram and Intel GMA 3600 graphics. I bought it
at best-buy in 2012 to replace a previous laptop that had just died. It
cost about $250 - which was all I could afford to spend and was about what
I had payed for the previous machine when it was new.

I use the Palemoon browser, a lighter weight version of Firefox, and keep
a terminal window open at all times because the browser frequently bogs
things down so badly that I have to switch to the terminal and use
"killall palemoon" to squash it.

If I have Calibre running and want to launch a browser to look up
information on a book, I have to use Midori because Firefoox or Palemoon
running at the same time as Calibre would mean waiting minutes at a time
for a stalled mouse cursor to move again.

I can stream videos from Youtube and other sites like
Gorillavid/Putlocker/Payed.to/etc. but if I download most videos, they are
usually too high of a resolution for me to play with VLC/Xine/etc in full
screen.

I really don't understand how this machine can be so bad. It has a gig of
ram which is as much as any machine I've ever owned had. I know the
GMA3600 graphics is horribly supported under Linux, but I've never had a
machine with video acceleration and have usually always been using the
VESA driver in X, so I really don't understand how that could effect
anything. I'm totally lost as to where it's processor ranks in the
pantheon of performance since I have had 20 years of just buying a new x86
machine and having it be much faster than a several year old machine that
it replaced. With the purchase of this machine, Moore's law has forsaken
me. This is significantly slower than the machine it replaced, and that
was probably purchased in 2008 or 2009?

Unfortunately, my finances haven’t allowed me to fork out for a
replacement, though I’m hoping that will change eventually. That’s why I
love seeing great potential hardware like these cheap Chromebooks in the
kind of price category that I can imagine I might one-day be able to shop
in ;-)

[eschwartz]

Wow -- my dinosaur is looking pretty good now!

Dell Inspiron B130
CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.40GHz x 1
RAM: 2011 MB
HDD: 40 GB

My mother bought it at least 10 years ago, and replaced it something like 7 years ago with her current dinosaur. I finally snapped it up and it runs things fairly well, all things considered.

(I am hoping to replace this with her current dinosaur sometime in the next year, if you are looking for a deal... )

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

My current computer may have yours beat.

It is 10+ years old, and still exists purely as an experiment in reviving oldness.

Somehow I manage to run MATE and cinnamon without it being totally unusable.

calibre loads in ~40s and I have at least 40 tabs open.

The only thing I upgraded was the RAM. Started with 256 MB and has 2 GB now.

Streaming video seems to be a problem solely because Flash has a violent disagreement with my system/hardware/something -- and I don't care enough to try fixing it.

I'm running Linux Mint 13 (LTS) Mate on my Dell Latitude D400 (1.4 Mhz Pentium M, 1 Gig memory, 80 GB hard drive -- came out in 2003). Works well. I used to dual boot with XP, but XP kept getting slower with each service pack -- at SP3 it basically become unusable. But, by then, I was hardly ever booting into the Windows anyhow. Pure Linux now. And Calibre runs fine in it.

[sl42]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Wow -- my dinosaur is looking pretty good now!

Dell Inspiron B130
CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.40GHz x 1
RAM: 2011 MB
HDD: 40 GB

My mother bought it at least 10 years ago, and replaced it something like 7 years ago with her current dinosaur. I finally snapped it up and it runs things fairly well, all things considered.

(I am hoping to replace this with her current dinosaur sometime in the next year, if you are looking for a deal... )

How many books in your Calibre library?

Leaving this browser tab and three others open (one is a google maps tab so this is a heavy load already), I'm going to lauch Calibre.

Here's what happened:

At 48 seconds, a black box appears on the screen which will eventually display the books logo.

At 3 minutes, 2 seconds, the bookshelf splash is now gets drawn in the black box.

At 4 minutes, 44 seconds, a small window - grey only opens.

At 5 minutes, 30 seconds, the window resizes to full screen.

At 5 minutes, 47 seconds, the upper left hand corner starts to draw - there's a bit of white background and a few cells drawn but this stalls here and the mouse takes more than a second to respond to a test movement.

At 6 minutes, 13 seconds - still the same situation on the screen, but the mouse takes several seconds to respond to a second test movement.

At 6 minutes, 44 seconds, most of the window is finally drawn.

At 6 minutes, 56 seconds the entire window is drawn and I am attempting to select a book from the library.

At 7 minutes, 6 seconds, my click on the third book from the top has registered and the book information is displayed!!!!

At this point I stop the timer on my phone, close Calibre and begin transcribing the notes above. When I got to the last bit (7 minutes 6 seconds) with only my browser open, the machine locked up and it took perhaps ten minutes (I didn't time it) to get to continue typing this message. That's pretty normal - I have similar experiences trying to compose a Facebook post or comment quite often.

This is for a two year old computer with a gig of ram and two freaking cores. Hell it's the only dual core computer I've ever owned in fact. I don't freaking get it.

Oh, and the book count in Calibre was 4,862 when it finally did launch.... so seriously, how many books are in your library that launches in 40 seconds on a 10 year old box?

[tubemonkey]

The Asus and HP chromeboxes are nearly identical in specs, with one major difference - RAM slots. Asus has two slots for RAM and HP only has one.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by sl42

How many books in your Calibre library?

Leaving this browser tab and three others open (one is a google maps tab so this is a heavy load already), I'm going to lauch Calibre.

Here's what happened:

At 48 seconds, a black box appears on the screen which will eventually display the books logo.

At 3 minutes, 2 seconds, the bookshelf splash is now gets drawn in the black box.

At 4 minutes, 44 seconds, a small window - grey only opens.

At 5 minutes, 30 seconds, the window resizes to full screen.

At 5 minutes, 47 seconds, the upper left hand corner starts to draw - there's a bit of white background and a few cells drawn but this stalls here and the mouse takes more than a second to respond to a test movement.

At 6 minutes, 13 seconds - still the same situation on the screen, but the mouse takes several seconds to respond to a second test movement.

At 6 minutes, 44 seconds, most of the window is finally drawn.

At 6 minutes, 56 seconds the entire window is drawn and I am attempting to select a book from the library.

At 7 minutes, 6 seconds, my click on the third book from the top has registered and the book information is displayed!!!!

At this point I stop the timer on my phone, close Calibre and begin transcribing the notes above. When I got to the last bit (7 minutes 6 seconds) with only my browser open, the machine locked up and it took perhaps ten minutes (I didn't time it) to get to continue typing this message. That's pretty normal - I have similar experiences trying to compose a Facebook post or comment quite often.

This is for a two year old computer with a gig of ram and two freaking cores. Hell it's the only dual core computer I've ever owned in fact. I don't freaking get it.

Oh, and the book count in Calibre was 4,862 when it finally did launch.... so seriously, how many books are in your library that launches in 40 seconds on a 10 year old box?

I just timed it, and it is really 29 seconds. From clicking the panel launcher to calibre appearing fully-formed. (I disabled the splash screen, because it would appear much sooner as a square of white halfway through -- and I don't really like splash screens.) 1140 books total, but the number of books is not nearly as important to calibre's startup (per the Word of God) as the number of custom columns built from other columns. Especially if they use functions to read the filesystem directly for a more accurate count of the book filesize, which I definitely don't do -- although I do have two columns built from other columns (one of which shows my save-to-disk/send-to-device template).

While it loaded, I continued on in the browser, no lag, while keeping an eye on the system tray time. No tabs were harmed during the course of this test. As stated, one single-core CPU (Celeron M).

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by rcentros

I'm running Linux Mint 13 (LTS) Mate on my Dell Latitude D400 (1.4 Mhz Pentium M, 1 Gig memory, 80 GB hard drive -- came out in 2003). Works well. I used to dual boot with XP, but XP kept getting slower with each service pack -- at SP3 it basically become unusable. But, by then, I was hardly ever booting into the Windows anyhow. Pure Linux now. And Calibre runs fine in it.

I only dual-boot into my XP SP3 partition when I need to use ADE (rare). Simply because I don't like it. But it does run fine now that I upgraded from the original 256 MB RAM. (It mostly runs away from me. )

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Sregener

This is for a two year old computer with a gig of ram and two freaking cores. Hell it's the only dual core computer I've ever owned in fact. I don't freaking get it.

What operating system, what antivirus (and other AntiCPU programs) are you using.
My old PC (now retired) had only Pentium 4 processor - one core, hyperthreading - and it was MUCH snappier even with one gig of RAM.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by kacir

What operating system, what antivirus (and other AntiCPU programs) are you using.
My old PC (now retired) had only Pentium 4 processor - one core, hyperthreading - and it was MUCH snappier even with one gig of RAM.

You're quoting the wrong person, there...

Originally Posted by sl42

This is for a two year old computer with a gig of ram and two freaking cores. Hell it's the only dual core computer I've ever owned in fact. I don't freaking get it.

He is running Xubuntu:

Originally Posted by sl42

I've been eyeing up chromebooks for some time now, particularly the Acer C720. Right now I'm running a very underpowered Atom netbook with one gig of ram, with Xubuntu 14.04. A C720 with 4GB of ram would be a significant upgrade from my current hardware, and for once I wouldn't be paying Microsoft for an OS that will never boot or get to run on any of my hardware. Couldn't care less whether Chrome-OS is useful/usable or not - either the hardware is worth the price or it isn't, and a lot of these Chromebooks offer great hardware and a great price - Who cares what OS the manufacturer installed? Hell, who cares if it even has an OS installed?

[sl42]

Originally Posted by kacir

What operating system, what antivirus (and other AntiCPU programs) are you using.
My old PC (now retired) had only Pentium 4 processor - one core, hyperthreading - and it was MUCH snappier even with one gig of RAM.

Hah, no. I run Linux.