Asus 1215T SSD upgrade. Worth it?

[d33pblue]

I bought an Asus 1215T netbook a few weeks ago. This is the one with the Athlon K125 CPU (1.7GHz) and ATI HD 4250 graphics. I read that the K125 is a decent upgrade over the 1.6Ghz Atom and that the graphics were decent.

Well... I must say I'm underwhelmed. This thing is painfully slow. It can't even play Hulu at 720p smoothly. Opening up Outlook takes nearly 10 seconds. All of the software and drivers are up to date, so that's not the issue.

I know it wouldn't help the video, but would it be worth swapping an SSD into this thing? I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade the X-25m in my desktop and instead of selling it, I could put it into the new netbook instead.


What do you guys thing? Worth it or waste of time?

 

[razel]

1st make sure you got plenty (2GB+ for Win7/Vista, 1GB+ for XP) of RAM. The only thing bareable that made the 2nd generation Atom netbook my folks once had was putting an SSD in there. It sped up navigating Win7 and surfing, but it blatantly exposed just how slow the CPU and GPU is. 720p was barely possible with GPU acceleration, so I'm sure your HD 4250 should fare better.

However, your money may be better spent selling it and moving to a AMD Zacate (HP dm1z) or Intel Core CULV based netbook. You might be happier in the long run. My folks are.

 

[d33pblue]

The netbook has 2GB of ram, which will suffice for what I'm using it for (browsing, Outlook, Hulu, etc). I wanted to stay with a very small and light notebook for a reasonable cost. Moving into Intel CULV territory jacks up the price substantially.

I still have my old 15" T61, 6lb behemoth. If all else fails I could just keep it, but man I hate carrying it around.

 

[nanaki333]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834215022

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834230005

you'd notice a huge difference just going with the 1ghz zacate. i put a 30GB vertex 2 in a dual core atom HTPC and you can definitely see the cpu struggling to keep up. i had nothing else to do with the vertex 2 since it came back from rma, so i figured what the hell

 

[frostedflakes]

Won't help you with some stuff like Hulu, but it should significantly decrease load times and make the system feel more responsive in general. You might also check out the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I bought an Asus 1215T netbook a few weeks ago. This is the one with the Athlon K125 CPU (1.7GHz) and ATI HD 4250 graphics. I read that the K125 is a decent upgrade over the 1.6Ghz Atom and that the graphics were decent.

Well... I must say I'm underwhelmed. This thing is painfully slow. It can't even play Hulu at 720p smoothly.

I have a notebook with 2GB RAM, 160GB HD, and ATI Radeon 3200 onboard graphics, and it plays full-screen (1366x768) Hulu just fine. I had to update the graphics drivers to a newer one that supported HW acceleration, but after I did that (and updated Adobe Flash Player), it's nice and smooth. I would try those things before you decide that it cannot do it.

Btw, mine has a TF-20 CPU, a 1.6Ghz single-core. I think that yours is a dual-core.

 

[d33pblue]

The K125 is a single core 1.7Ghz Athlon II. All graphics drivers and flash versions are updated. It will play 720p, it's just choppy and dropping frames. I would rather watch smooth 480p than jerky 720p. Disappointing really. I read elsewhere that this laptop handled 720p just fine. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

I'm generally very busy with life and work, so selling this laptop and buying another is not something I'm interested in doing. If I could just make this one work better, I'd be far happier.

 

[razel]

On a slight side note, since you're on a laptop. I had an issue with IE9 and Win7 lately where streaming HD video lagged when I am on battery power. When this happened before, it was because 'passive cooling' was enabled by default when on battery power. This causes the CPU to throttle it's speed instead of spinning the fans to reduce temperature when it gets too high. Well I didn't have that chosen, but apparently IE9 adds it's own power setting for javascript performance. You may want to check that as well.

 

[craigjohnsonaz]

I put in a 60GB Vertex II, the difference is amazing. Boot time is lightning fast now, browsing the web is faster. I also put in 4GB of RAM.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slCiymZSE0I