Even more competition for the Eee Pc! MSI Wind, Acer, ECS

Just when you thought ASUS were under pressure for the ultraportable market, along come three more challengers to the Eee’s throne. Both Acer, MSI, and ECS are planning on joining ASUS and Everex in the booming affordable ultraportable market. The good news is all three companies are looking to amend the main issue with the ASUS Eee Pc — the screensize. Acer are looking to match the Eee Pc 900’s 8.9 inch screen; MSI are considering an 8 or 10 inch screen; whilst ECS plan on having a range of sizes from 8.2 to 10.2 inches. Even better news is the fact that the Acer machine will be cheaper than the Eee Pc 900; although, pricing for the ECS or MSI machine is currently unknown, but it would be a huge blow to ASUS if ECS or MSI could get a 10″ model to retail at the same price as the Eee Pc 900.

Very little details for each machine is available right now, but I’ve tried to gather as much information as possible.

Acer

• 8.9″ Screen
• Rumoured 800×480 resolution (WTF??!)
• 4-8GB of Flash storage, or traditional drive
• Estimated price $350-400
• May release

ECS

• 8.2″ to 10.2″ Screen
• Intel Atom Processor
• Intel 945 GSE chipset
• Upto 2GB of DRAM (Dynamic Ram)
• 3G Connectivity
• WiFi
• 56k Modem
• Bluetooth
• 4 in 1 Card Reader
• 4-6 Cell Battery

MSI ‘Wind’

• 8″ or 10″ Screen
• 1024×768 resolution (not widescreen?)
• Intel Atom Processor, between 1 GHz -1.6 GHz
• 1GB RAM as standard
• Choice of Solid State or Traditional 2.5″ drive
• Linux or Windows
• 7 Hour battery life
• Retail between £299 - £699 ($500 - $1400)

All information was gathered from the links in the article. I don’t make up FUD!

Things could look very interesting for the consumer this summer, as the many choices of ultraportable hit the market. I can see the price of the original Eee dropping, perhaps by £25-50 ($50-100,) and the 8GB model taking its current price. There would be little point in buying an Eee at the current price, as the Acer seems to be offering more for the same price. All this rivalry in the market is good for the consumer, and prices will fall. Who knows, we might even see an Ultraportable hit the magic number — £99 ($199.)

Crysis on the Eee, including screenshots!

I couldn’t believe I got this working, but you can run Crysis on the Eee. For those of you running Windows XP or Vista on your Eee, this is a real treat. I don’t think you will have any luck running Crysis under Wine or VirtualBox as the Eee barely copes with the game in the first place.

First you need to be comfortable with overclocking to attempt this and have upgraded your memory. You’ll need to be up to 2 or 4GB of ram, as you need some of the space to install parts of the game on. Running directly from memory makes the game run much smoother.

Please check the post’s date.

With my ASUS Eee Pc at 630Mhz and Crysis on medium settings at 800×480 I get only 12 fps. Once I put the processor up to its true speed of 900Mhz I got the game going at 18fps. Finally with my Eee running at 1035Mhz I managed to squeeze out 20fps, just enough to make the game stable. This was done with numerous tweaks to the game.

Although the game is demanding, the small resolution of the Eee makes it playable. Desktops struggle as users attempt to play the game at resolutions about twice that of the Eee, which require far more power.

Anyway, I can’t write up a full guide now as it’s getting late. So enjoy the pictures. Click the links to open the 5 megapixel shots, you can see my monitors dead pixel in the last…

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 1

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 2

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 3 (You can even see my Eee’s dead pixel!)

If you haven’t realised by now, this was an April Fools joke.

Random picture of the week: Java edition

This picture just had to make it one week:

We got bored waiting for someone to turn up at the pub (and our food,) so we had some fun. The crazy stuff computer science students get up to!

Caffeine Headache…

I am currently suffering from a nasty caffeine head-ache. I went home (after guzzling tons of tea, coffee, and coke to live through the evil last weeks of the term,) to find all the tea and coffee was caffeine free. Now I normally would have no problem with this, but after a ‘caffeine binge’ not touching the stuff will cause a nasty headache.

Trying to do an assessment with a banging head is not fun. Neither are the pains of three hours of football

Request Access, ReframeIt, and Fleck

Another day, another three Firefox extensions ready for you to try out.

Request Access

Whether you’re still in education or stuck at work (I made that sound fun, didn’t I?) It’s highly likely that you have seen the ‘Access Denied: Inappopiate Content’ message, or filtered by ‘x’ webpage crop up on numerous occasions. Well how about a nice extension for you to message whoever decided to block the site in question? With some luck the site may be accessable one day.

We have a bit of a theme here, two extensions used for annotating the web. A really handy set of tools if you’re writing a dissertation, thesis, or just an esssay. I’ll be repeating myself if I describe the benefits of each extension, so I’ll let the authors do the talking. These extensions handle the task of annotating the web in different ways, one with a separate frame, the other in sticky note style.

ReframeIt

ReframeIt adds a collapsible side-margin to your web browser where you can comment on the text of any website. All comments are part of a free online community where you can share your thought and ideas across the web.ReframeIt adds a new layer of meaning to the web by allowing users to provide their own comments along-side any website. The ReframeIt Plug-in creates a collapsible margin in the side of your web browser where the your thoughts and ideas are displayed. All Comments are organized through groups and tags allowing other users to locate interesting web content and see it placed in a new context.

Fleck

Fleck allows you to add Notes and Bullets to websites. You can then share these annotated pages with other people. After installation a small button will appear in your browser. Click that button when you visit a website and you will get a toolbar at the bottom of the page you are visiting. Another small icon will show you if there are Annotated versions of the page you are currently visiting.

Competition heating up between affordable ultraportable laptops

Whilst for some time the ASUS Eee PC 701 has been the lone affordable ultraportable laptop on the market, it won’t enjoy that priveledge for much longer. With the emergence of the Everex CloudBook the Eee has finally got some competition. Here are the specifications for this little machine:

• gOS Rocket operating system (Linux variant)
• 1.2GHz, VIA C7-M Processor (ULV)
• 512MB DDR2 533MHz, SDRAM
• 30GB Hard Disk Drive (3600rpm parallel ATA)
• 7″ WVGA TFT Display (800 x 480)
• VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics
• VIA High-Definition Audio
• 802.11b/g WiFi
• 10/100 Ethernet Port
• DVI Port
• Two USB 2.0 Ports
• 4-in-1 Media Card Reader
• 0.3MP Webcam
• Headphone/Line-Out Port
• Microphone/Line-In Port
• 4-cell Lithium-Ion Battery

Now these are quite impressive when you find the Cloudbook will retail at $399 — the same price as the 4GB eee PC. For the same price a user will get a processor running at twice the speed (the eee uses a 900mhz chip, but it is factory underclocked to 630mhz) and just under 8 times the storage space. Sadly, well maybe not for eee users, there is a twist in the tale. The hard drive only spings at 3600 rpm, your typical desktop drive will run at twice this. This means, according to NotebookReview.com:

Both the average data transfer speed (read/write speed) and the average data access time (how long it takes the drive to locate data) for the 30GB hard drive where slower than either the internal 4GB SSD inside the Asus Eee PC or a 16GB SDHC card used as a second storage drive inside the Eee PC.

Now that is quite staggering information. Thus, one could overclock (techincally this would not actually be overclocking, as you will be simply making the processor run at its correct speed,) their eee then insert a 16GB, or soon a 32GB, SDHC card and have a, plausibly, superior system to the Everex; although, this would be more expensive.

Secondly, the operating system gOS Linux is just as poor as Xandros Linux on the eee. Neither machine comes with an operating system that the majority of users would be satisfied with. If either machine used something like Xubunu, or even a tweaked version of Ubuntu, the systems would feel much more complete. For reference I removed Xandros for Xubuntu on my eee in less than a week.

Now Asus will be releasing a more expensive version of the Eee, the Eee PC 900 that features numerous improvements:

• 9″ screen running at 1024×600
• Multitouch trackpad
• Integrated bluetooth
• 8 or 12GB solid state drive

Now all this on top of what the Eee PC already offers for only $100 more ($400) seems like a great bargin; although, the price starts to tred on the heels of larger machines with much higher specifications. This will probably cause the price of the 4GB 701 to drop, and the 8GB model move to the $300 price point. Otherwise, I can see the 701s struggle; I own a 701 and would be tempted with the 900 if the price stays at $400.

I know many people who are turned off the idea of the Eee or the Cloudbook, simply because of the 7 inch screen. Now with a 9 inch screen these people will have to think again about these laptops. If everything goes well, demand for the Asus Eee Pc 900 could even outstrip the current demand for the 701.

Wordpress 2.5

There doesn’t seem to be long before the next major release of Wordpress — version 2.5. Originally planned for release on the 10th of March, it seems that Wordpress 2.5 is not far away. Looks like I might have an interesting couple of weeks (if I choose to ignore revision, which is bound to happen;) with the possible releases of Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Wordpress 2.5. For whatever reason the developers decided to ignore 2.4, I guess this was intended to make the release seem more important.

Wordpress 2.5 does feature major changes in the Dashboard and ‘Write’ pages, but nothing there really interests me. It will probably be easier to navigate, but I don’t find the current solution to be cumbersome. Here are the major changes:

• Faster load times.
• Multi-file uploads.
• Customisable Dashboard
• New “Media Manager” for images, audio, video, etc.
• Built-in gallery function.
• Built-in (and pluggable) Gravatars support.
• One-click auto-update for plug-ins.
• Reactivate plugins after a ‘Deactivate All Plug-ins’ action.
• Tag management

Notice the one in bold? (I really hope you did, otherwise you might want to see an optician.) Yep, a built-in gallery! Now I don’t need to bother with setting up Gallery2, or any other Gallery plugin. Wordpress will have the function straight out of the box, except it doesn’t come in a box… So when the stable version of 2.5 is released, and Dreamhost get round to supporting it, I’ll happily move over for the gallery alone. The other features all sound nice (who doesn’t like faster load times?) but nothing else really sounds groundbreaking. I wonder how the many Gallery plug-ins will react, will we see some improvements being made to them, to warrant their installation? Or will they just die out (well, the Wordpress forks.)

Cache seems to be acting up

Not sure how, but the cacheing seems to be weird. I might need to sort out the settings, I’ve lost a post thanks to it… and you might not even see this one for sometime…

Great!

Silly picture of the Week: Fast Cars?

A nice find on Bristol road:

 

Not sure if the sign is still there, the road works are probably finished now.

Running TFW in Linux

Getting Diablo 2 mods working in Linux can be a pain (especially when you try running them from an Asus eee pc,) although Diablo runs perfectly in Wine, mods can be somewhat more tricky. I do know that any mod that uses Nefarius’s NefEx system will run perfectly, as I created and tested the Ragnarok mod using this system (on my eee too!) However, some mods can be more tricky to run and TFW: The Awakening is a special case as it utilises a vbs script to run under Windows. This is the only mod I know of that uses such a system.

One user on the Keep, AGUtilities, has created a nice bash script, which simulates the effects of the vbs script under Linux. All the calls to Wine are inserted in the script so all you have to do is put the script into your TFW folder and run it. Make sure you have Wine installed before running the script, otherwise you’ll just get a bunch of error messages.

I’ve checked the script and it does nothing malicious,  it’s pretty easy to understand what it is doing.

You can get the script from here.

I’ve provided a download mirror here.