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Securix is offline Securix
2008-08-18 , 17:08
Posts: 107 | Thanked: 26 times | Joined on Jan 2008 @ New Jersey
#1
Looks like some price cuts for the Everex Cloudbook (and the re-badged Sylvania Netbook G).

J&R Music World is selling the Sylvania Netbook G and Wal-mart is selling the Cloudbook, each for $299.

I decided to order one from J&R to play around with during my trip to Pittsburgh for the 3RP festival. Hopefully it should be here this week.

http://cloudbookumpc.com/sylvania-g-...opped-to-us299

http://www.jr.com/sylvania/pe/SVV_GNET13001

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/produ...uct_id=8245470
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danramos is offline danramos
2008-08-18 , 18:07
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#2
I hope they've fixed that really awful BIOS. I had bought one way back RIGHT on release day and it was GREAT--except that you can't boot anything but the built-in hard drive unless you want to boot an SD card (only--no CDROM, no USB devices, etc) and when you boot from SD, the hard drive doesn't exist as a device anymore. I believe the Phoenix BIOS that came with it was by far the worst thing I've ever seen in my entire life. I eventually returned the unit because the hard drive had become unbootable after hacking around with it for a while with no way to install another OS on there and the unit came with no way to restore it. When I had called for support, I was told that I would need to ship them the Cloudbook and they would have to do it for me. I've read the same from everyone else online. The only people who've successfully managed to restore the HDD or install another OS on it were people who remove the hard drive (which I didn't want to do.. and it's not designed for you to do that) and used another computer to format it and work with it.

Let me know if that's changed. If they've improved the BIOS, I may give it another chance.
 
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2008-08-18 , 20:37
Posts: 107 | Thanked: 26 times | Joined on Jan 2008 @ New Jersey
#3
I was looking to add a device that fell somewhere between my 17" Acer Aspire laptop and my N800/N810.

I love my N8x0's especially for traveling and portable media playback. But my eyes get tired using the small screen for extended periods of time, especially IM'ing and doing more than a few casual web searches. So I thought something like this would fit the niche nicely.

The gOS it comes with looks ok, but reviewers on TigerDirect said it has some issues with networking, and most of them have blown away gOS and installed XP anyway. Hopefully the BIOS issues you mentioned have since been remedied. It looks like a nice machine otherwise, though maybe a little on the slow side.
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2008-08-28 , 21:52
Posts: 107 | Thanked: 26 times | Joined on Jan 2008 @ New Jersey
#4
Originally Posted by danramos View Post
I hope they've fixed that really awful BIOS. I had bought one way back RIGHT on release day and it was GREAT--except that you can't boot anything but the built-in hard drive unless you want to boot an SD card (only--no CDROM, no USB devices, etc) and when you boot from SD, the hard drive doesn't exist as a device anymore.

Let me know if that's changed. If they've improved the BIOS, I may give it another chance.
It looks like they may have revised it with respect to what you described. I was able to boot into a USB flash drive and still see the hard drive. In fact, I went into the BIOS config and was able to see the USB device as a bootable drive in the boot order menu and pop it to the top of the list so it would boot first.

gOS that it comes with (essentialy a tweaked Ubuntu) was visually appealing but seemed to crash a lot and did not manage WiFi very well.

So since Sylvania (Digital Gadgets) provides the XP drivers for everything, I built a USB flash-based Windows XP installer and blew XP onto it. When I left today, I left it downloading SP3 from Windows Updates over WiFi and it was just starting the install. Seemed to be fine.

One annoyance though, is that I guess it has a tiny fan underneath that makes a very annoying buzz when it spins to high RPMs. It actually sounds a lot like a CD or DVD drive spinning up and down as it's seeking.

It's certainly not a speed demon, but other than that its not a bad little laptop for $300 that fits almost anywhere.
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2008-08-28 , 22:31
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#5
Yeah, but this 1024x600 baby is down to $329. I say a little more patience; the war is just beginning.
 
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2008-08-29 , 03:59
Posts: 107 | Thanked: 26 times | Joined on Jan 2008 @ New Jersey
#6
Yea I started seeing more and more ads for the Acer One recently. The $329 model only has 512MB RAM and 8GB SSD. SSD is nice but 8GB is a little lacking. The Sylvania has a 30GB hard drive and 1GB RAM, albeit a smaller display.

However, the appealing thing about The One it is that the vanilla GMA950 video hardware on it makes it a good candidate to attempt a Mac OSX install. I wonder what WiFi and audio hardware it uses...
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geneven is offline geneven
2008-08-29 , 04:28
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#7
No bluetooth on the Acer One. I'm not sure I care that much. I might replace Linpus with some other Linux.
 
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2008-08-29 , 17:25
Posts: 2,427 | Thanked: 2,986 times | Joined on Dec 2007
#8
I didn't notice the 1G on the Sylvania. That's nice. I'm still waiting for something without a fan. That's a top 5 feature of my N800: silence. At a minimum, I still say wait for some of those holiday prices. It's almost September.
 
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2008-08-29 , 17:48
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#9
It seems that the 1G version is about $329 and the 500M version is $299.

I think the 1024x600 is a minimum requirement for me. We already have 800x480 on our tablets. At this point, I'm not sure I can do that for a laptop. I say we're gonna have sub $300 9 inch toys by the holidays.
 
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danramos is offline danramos
2008-08-29 , 18:06
Posts: 4,672 | Thanked: 5,455 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Springfield, MA, USA
#10
Originally Posted by Securix View Post
It looks like they may have revised it with respect to what you described. I was able to boot into a USB flash drive and still see the hard drive. In fact, I went into the BIOS config and was able to see the USB device as a bootable drive in the boot order menu and pop it to the top of the list so it would boot first.

gOS that it comes with (essentialy a tweaked Ubuntu) was visually appealing but seemed to crash a lot and did not manage WiFi very well.

So since Sylvania (Digital Gadgets) provides the XP drivers for everything, I built a USB flash-based Windows XP installer and blew XP onto it. When I left today, I left it downloading SP3 from Windows Updates over WiFi and it was just starting the install. Seemed to be fine.

One annoyance though, is that I guess it has a tiny fan underneath that makes a very annoying buzz when it spins to high RPMs. It actually sounds a lot like a CD or DVD drive spinning up and down as it's seeking.

It's certainly not a speed demon, but other than that its not a bad little laptop for $300 that fits almost anywhere.
Well, this is certainly better news. But does it recognize Linux bootloaders on USB? (Just because it sees DOS/Windows doesn't mean Linux can boot off the USB.) And more importantly, can it boot off of a CD-ROM over USB? If it does, then we're ALL done--Windows and Linux should both work fine since CD booting is pretty similar across all OS's (El Dorito, generally [misspelling intentional for comedic effect]).

I'm mostly interested in replacing gOS with Ubuntu, especially now that VIA has finally completely open-sourced the motherboard chipset drivers and the video chipset drivers being used on the Cloudbook.
 
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