How useable is the Notus?

Not sure whether anyone will be able to answer this. The Notus looks great in terms of size and battery life (if almost Mac like in price!). However, with an 800MHz processor, has anyone found it usable? Anyone put a lightweight Linux on it? Maybe something with xfce desktop?

I can't imagine that Vista would be at all usable with something that slow! I have a wee Asus Aspire one with a 1.6G Atom with Linpus Linux and that is surprisingly fast, but this is half as fast.

I suspect the Dell E Slim will be a better bet in terms of performance and price, but it's nice to support a smaller and European company if possible.

 

Did you read my review? Link below. There is also more discussion of the Notus in this thread. Vista is not the ideal OS for a slow CPU and 1GB RAM. However, this is a consequence of Microsoft's marketing strategy.

The slow speed is not a problem 90% of the time but can cause a noticeable lag under certain conditions.

One of our regular members has the Notus and I'm sure he will be able to add more about his experience in everyday usage.

John

 

Well when running Vista you need to wteak it a little to have a usable machine for everyday use.
I wouldn't recommend having Aero enabled, eventhough it works just fine, and services like Indexing ect. needs to be disabled.

The Notus is fine if you can get into the habit of running one application at a time. Otherwise 1GB RAM is too little under Vista.

I've had Ubtunu 8.04 installed on it and everything runs out of the box, except the sound (Realtek 251 Audio chip) and the wireless (Atheros AR5008X), but there are workarounds for that online if you want to get it to work. The Bluetooth i haven't gotten to work as it under Windows needs the System Utility to be enabled.
Regarding the WLAN i would recommend getting a Intel 3945 instead as this works out of the box in Linux with no modification. You could probably install something like Xubuntu instead, but i haven't tried that. Ubuntu runs just fine with 1GB RAM

The touchpad is the only thing that i feel can get a little annoying to work with because of it's size and that you can't use it fully to the edge, but generally i use a Logitech VX Nano instead and disable the built in touchpad

 

Thanks, folks. What I was really trying to ascertain was how usable it would be speed-wise with Linux, rather than what would work (as most things work with little hassle these days on Linux).

The Acer Aspire One only has 512M of RAM and is rapid enough; memory isn't a big issue with an xfce desktop on Linux, in fact KDE on Mandriva runs quite happily with 512M. It's really the processor speed that concerns me and I can imagine things like Acrobat being a bit of a dog on such a slow device.

I wasn't for one second suggesting that I would run Vista, Microsoft don't interest me, but I just cannot see how a 600MHz processor would be remotely satisfactory for such a resource hog of an OS. As that's the Windows OS that seems to be available with it, I wondered how on earth people would make practical use of it.