$399 Widescreen lappy @ BB

[geecee]

Originally posted by: Jaxidian

Originally posted by: geecee
Back up too $450 now. Too bad. Was an OK deal at $399. Not so great now considering what you can get for $50 or so more.

I see it at 399 again.

:thumbsup: Nice.

Originally posted by: RedBeard
I wonder how the integrated graphics compare to the Intel GMA950 or ATI 200m?

I have a desktop board where I used the Chrome9 IGP for a bit before putting in a discrete card. Assuming the performance is roughly comparable, I'd say it's fine for windows desktop (even runs Aero, if you had Home Premium), DVD & video. As for games, it's ok at best for older ones at low res, but don't even bother trying to run anything recent (last 2 years or so) on it.

 

[Redfoot]

Wasn't cyrix known to be the redneck pentium back in the day? Factory overclocked and such?

I do remember the winchips from a few years back. I am surprised they are not more popular.

 

[eggrolls]

well, i played around with this thing over the weekend. the first time starting up took like half an hour since it had to do some "configuring for first time use" and then vista had to run its own tests and stuff. vista runs somewhat slowly... too slow imo.

so i installed windows xp and it runs nicely. much, much faster than vista. since the processor sucks, anything cpu bound will be slow. drivers are available on everex's website so everything works (although i didn't try the dial-up modem). battery lasts for about 3 hours without doing anything cpu intensive. screen is ok. the touchpad doesn't have the scrolling "strip". it only has one speaker and it sounds terrible.

overall, it's pretty good if you install xp and use it for web browsing and word processing.

 

[purduecmpe]

Yep to quote myself...
If you are buying this laptop you are buying it for battery life and basic computing not gaming/performance.

And people, people, people for the love of G-d this is not a freaking Cyrix CPU. Cyrix is dead and gone. This X86 cpu is made by the 98 engineers at Centaur Technology in Austin, TX. http://www.centtech.com/

 

[tylerdustin2008]

Originally posted by: Blurry

512KB PC4200 DDR2 SDRAM for multitasking power, expandable to 2GB

Trying running Vista with that

HAHAHAHA 512kb, thats what best buy says it has. Damn thats allot of ram i don't know what i would do with that much.

 

[geecee]

Originally posted by: eggrolls
well, i played around with this thing over the weekend. the first time starting up took like half an hour since it had to do some "configuring for first time use" and then vista had to run its own tests and stuff. vista runs somewhat slowly... too slow imo.

so i installed windows xp and it runs nicely. much, much faster than vista. since the processor sucks, anything cpu bound will be slow. drivers are available on everex's website so everything works (although i didn't try the dial-up modem). battery lasts for about 3 hours without doing anything cpu intensive. screen is ok. the touchpad doesn't have the scrolling "strip". it only has one speaker and it sounds terrible.

overall, it's pretty good if you install xp and use it for web browsing and word processing.

Hmm. You'd think this system could get closer to 4 hours, rather than 3 only. If it's not the CPU eating power and the other peripherals are comparable to any other laptops', I wonder if the Via chipset is just not that optimized for low power operation. Or is it just that the CPU eats such a negligible amount of power compared to the rest of the system that one really doesn't see much battery improvement overall regardless.

Did you try ripping a DVD and then using DVD shrink to compress the video? I'm curious to see how much slower the C7 will handle something like that. Thanks.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Originally posted by: Redfoot
Wasn't cyrix known to be the redneck pentium back in the day? Factory overclocked and such?

I do remember the winchips from a few years back. I am surprised they are not more popular.

That's a pretty accurate description. When Intel had 3 pipes, Cyrix was pushing the same number of cycles through 2. This was further aided with RISC, so it wasn't good for gaming, but for the time it didn't matter. Everything was still running 8-16 bit graphics anyhow. I had a Cyrix 133+ in a system. They always had a + on the end of the system because of the overclocking... These out-benchmarked most AMDs and were extremely affordable. The downside was that due to the RISC-based instruction set some touchy applications didn't run well and advanced native DOS programs would sometimes throw a fit. Other than that, they did alright for a system one half to two thirds the price of the Intel equivalent.

To add one more point. Cyrix was funded by IBM. They basically didn't have the marketing and appeal that AMD had for an alternative to Intel, so they lost their backing when it didn't take off. There just wasn't enough marketshare left after Intel and AMD for them to survive mainstream. I'm really impressed that Dell is finally selling AMD chips to compete with HP. It's a step in the right direction...I just hope they can get some Opterons in the server market. The motherboard architecture is pretty awesome.

 

[purduecmpe]

Dell using AMD is just a me too move, but HP using the C7 chip now there is real innovation:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38898

The C7 is the four cylinder engine of the computer industry. Not the fastest but very economical and will get you to where you need to go. I think the type of performance Chipzilla and AMD are producing these days is becoming more and more niche. The majority of computer users in the world have basic computing needs that should be met at a very low cost.

Cheap chips and free software... The barbarians are at the gates!