Question about 6730s and Mini 2140

Hi,

I just posted something similar on the: What laptop should I buy? portion of the site and got referred here

Basically I'm interested to buy an HP Compaq 6730s and a Mini 2140 netbook.

What I'd like to know is if these things will play HD content?

I have a few Matroska encoded videos of which my PIV desktop refuses to play back smoothly. The sound and video are totally out of sync and on my Centrino based laptop I don't even get sound, all be it I am trying to stream these things off an NFS mount via 54Mbps wireless. I am guessing not enough bandwidth is my issue as the connection tops out at round 1.36MB/s x 8 gives round 11Mbps which minus the overhead on the half duplex wireless connection doesn't leave one with much even though the AP is a Cisco ISR based router!

Well that said I'd also like to know why the netbook, the Mini 2140 has not been released in HD guise in the UK??? This is so weird that HP would release this everywhere around the world but here!

As a network and UNIX engineer I am generally consoled into things all the time, meaning SSH sessions and serial tty lines, and I am a bit concerned that the 1024x576 res of the Mini isn't going to be enough. Also for use with the odd video and lots of web stuff browsing/email. No no YouTube

The thing is that the Mini would make a great compact tool in the field so I can take it around to different sites, connect up and use it for my purposes, as mentioned but also network sniffing and scanning to identify and debug faults.

On top of that I would like to know finally about the heat dissipated by these machines. How much or little it is?? In the past I have had 2 Acer Ferrari laptops and a Hi-Grade Notino 12" which all seem to overheat. Currently my laptop is running at 200 degrees F and although I haven't checked the vent of this system I did check one of the Ferraris and very little dust had collected in between the vent and fan area. That's why if these machines run cooler it would be great, baring in mind that they will be running Sun Solaris and Linux as a dual boot which usually tend to take up more cycles then MS and Apple based OS's.

Has anyone got any ideas or thoughts that might help me out??

Many thanks!

 

Has anyone got any answers to my questions??

I just need to know if the machines I mentioned have HD video playback capability???

Something like a 1280x700 resolution Matroska video file.....

My PIV desktop with ATI Radeon 9600XT won't run it smoothely and forget my integrated Intel i810 based 12" Centrino laptop I get no sound at all -- ok might be network bandwidth as 802.11g doesn't have much.

Even taking to account the possibilities of what's going on bottom line is that when running from the hard disk I'd like this to work and since I haven't bought an x86 based system in 8 years it would be nice to get something powerful enough to run these things at a relatively low cost!

If anyone has any clues as to why the HP netbook HD mentioned isn't available in the UK that would also be very much appreciated. It isn't a big deal but I thought that the higher screen res would help in playback of HD videos.....

Any response would be good!

Many thanks.

 

Hmm... Gateway went bust in the UK years ago as my first desktop was a Gateway 2000

As a network engineer I need something small and cute which is also capable of running HD video but it's not a must in which case I would fall back to a larger laptop like the HP Compaq 6730s.

I am only really looking at Lenovo, HP, or Toshiba and maybe Samsung as I have had major realiability issues with Acers, I broke 2 Ferrari's and the amount of general usage I put on these machines means that realiability is a must. Basically as they will need to run UNIX of which I use to do some system design in my spare time but at work I use it to serial into network devices and servers and use lots of network scanning software.

Not to forget to mention the everyday stuff like web browsing, sending emails, and writing reports. Ok a 486 could do that but that isn't the point!

So yeh I mean if the larger 15.4" Compaq I suggested is good for HD then I'll go for 2 as I can get both for under a grand UK currency!!

My budget is only 1000 pounds gbp though so am limited by that.

Many thanks

 

Sorry I don't want to sound like a complete snob (hmm word filtering is enabled...??) but I will never buy an Acer again just out of the shear problems I have had with them! Although they have lasted me between 6-8 years or so but they keep breaking in the middle and I am left sending them off for repair

The HP 6730s I mentioned has this graphics card: ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3430

which I am guessing by the HD in the name means it's HD ready??

This system has 384MB shared vRAM or 256MB dedicated memory so this should be ok.....

Also nice for movies as 15.4" screen, and I can use the little netbook, the mini 2140 as my stty line and SSH machine, although again am having serious doubts over the 1024x576 res but then at least with UNIX desktops you get as many as you like depending on how you configure your system

If I had the extra cash the Lenovo x301 would be the perfect partner for me I'm sure but is out of my price range - that said does Lenovo still do what IBM used to by having a p series (no not the POWER6 chip based servers) but the GFX workstation models??

High performance ATI or NVIDEA GPU's with dashings of vRAM to boot..... yum will need a promotion for this first - time to go kick my bosses backside I think

 

Ok well I finally decided to go for an HP Compaq 2230s!!

Didn't even bother booting into Vista just ran my Gentoo Resque CD and formatted the HD.

Then got a copy of Kubuntu 9.04 64-bit running on here now.

Machine is excellent and everything works!!!! Ok GFX resolution is 1024x768 super imposed onto the 1280x800 widescreen but that's ok I haven't started hacking yet. Will get the Intel drivers from openintel developer repositories soon and start building them into the kernel.

[EDIT]There is a bug with KDE4 rendering menus and windows in 1024x768 res while standard res is fine, just ran Gnome2 on here and it's perfect!!! So go ahead potential Linux users on this machine run Gnome, IMT I will let the KDE4 developers know what is going on!!!!

Overall success )