[Persona-sama]

I was thinking of getting a netbook like an Acer One or EEEpc or anything less than 400 dollars just to have a dedicated machine for running Windows games and for development. My friend uses his to run Maya and it seems to run it pretty well but I'm wondering if it's able to play the games and such.

I'd probably only play shitty games like PSU or Shin Megami Tensei Online: Imagine, but I was wondering if anyone else has some experience in these things and can tell me how they hold up.
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[Tulpa]

I've got a Lenovo Ideapad and I don't think it can run games decently at all. It struggles with Half-Life 1.
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[Persona-sama]

Hm, that's pretty discouraging. I suppose it's because they don't really have 3d cards?
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[Tulpa]

Entirely, yes. 2d games run wonderfully however.
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[Takashi]

Yeah, the chipset won't play anything beyond cheap simple-looking indie and old games, and the 600 px vertical resolution doesn't help.

I ran PSU on a 800Mhz PIII and a 2001-era Geforce Ti200, and it delivered 25fps at 800x600 most of the time. My 1.6Ghz Intel 530 "regular" 15" laptop that uses the same chipset as the netbooks staggered while running Blue Burst, and hit single digits on PSU.

Acer is going to release a small desktop that has a dedicated Nvidia 3D chipset and a netbook processor, that might make it minimally capable of gaming (and by gaming I mean, a staggered, 20-ish frame version of Half Life II), and it's likely to go under 300$. Netbooks based on that structure should appear in the next months.

But at that price you can provably buy a better, if larger, Dell box or build your own via newegg.
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low-end.net | Whimsy (soon) | Serfdom 2.0

[radish]

Sadly, the only video game I play anymore is WoW. If there were a netbook that could play that well, I think I would carry it in my pocket and play it everywhere I went. I'd be the most worthless person anyone ever met.

[Martial Loh]

[km]

If you don't need portability and have a monitor you can dual purpose, you can build a fine machine for the same price as a netbook if not less ($300). It'll have integrated graphics, sure, but miles better than what you get in a netbook and you could pop in any video card you want later if you want more power. Even $100 video cards now offer fantastic performance.
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vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[Takashi]

even if you want a laptop, for 400$ you can nowadays pull a cheap 15" single core Celeron M that will perform fine.
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low-end.net | Whimsy (soon) | Serfdom 2.0

[Talbain]

[Takashi]

[Talbain]

[manmachine plays jazz]

persona, they aren't very good for playing games, but they are excellent utilities. the intel atom (processor in most netbooks) is amazing for power consumption considering that an atom-based PC will do just about any damn thing outside of gaming that you'd probably want to do. i can get 5 or 6 hours out of my eee 1000h easily, and it runs so quiet you can barely tell it is even on.

don't buy any notebook that's below a grand unless it is a netbook, every sub-$1000 notebook i've used has been full of awful parts and terrible workmanship. i had to troubleshoot tons of notebook issues at my last job, and honestly, i wouldn't really trust $1000+ PC notebooks either. (buy a mac lol post?)

i don't have a lot of experience with the msi wind/dell 9/acer aspireone but i can say that the asus eee is a good piece of hardware for the money. i've had mine almost a year now and i haven't had a single problem with it.

[Talbain]

[Aaron]

Just installed Morrowind on my brand new Samsung NC10, and it runs it just great without any tweaking on my part, other than adjusting the resolution. So I expect most lowest common denominator MMOs will run just fine.

[Takashi]

[DonMarco]

[BotageL]

I'm really happy with my EEE1000HD, the ghetto 900mhz non-Atom Best Buy model from a while back. For taking notes, writing papers, and web browsing it's pretty awesome. Unfortunately, since it's non-Atom, I can only get about 3 hours per charge with the wireless switched on, but I imagine in the 8-ish months since I got this thing that the Atom ones are all of comparable prices again. I actually haven't gotten around to trying many games on here, probably because I'm usually busy using it for vaguely productive tasks, and Diablo II is a real fuckin' pain on a touchpad anyway.

For laughs, I installed the first official Windows 7 beta on it a while back when I had to reformat anyway, and while it works pretty well I hit on a rather obvious problem which I'm hoping is fixed in later W7 builds, where an error with the way it handles old XP video drivers (which are the only ones available for my laptop's chipset) causes the system to freeze any time a program tries to play a video file. (Except for VLC, because VLC has its own video playback code and completely ignores your codecs, which is handy for this stuff.) It does seem a bit sluggish sometimes, but I'm not sure if that's W7 or the processor's fault. I do know that The GIMP takes something like two minutes to actually finish loading after I launch it, which isn't so bad since I can keep doing other stuff while I wait for it to load.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[Takashi]

[DonMarco]

[BotageL]

I find the 10" is pretty much the perfect netbook size, where it's really easily portable and lightweight but still very usable. Any smaller, and typing on the tiny little keyboards becomes a chore. I used to have a big ol' 14" or 15" Dell laptop that was far more powerful, but after using my EEE for months, it's hard to remember how I used to tolerate lugging that behemoth around campus when I never needed that much power. The higher resolution screen would be nice if I installed CS4 on it, maybe.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[DonMarco]

10 most-anticipated netbooks of 2009

Also! Check with liliputing.com for news and reviews. Be sure to post here when you pick or buy one so we can criticize and judge your choice.
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Still alive.

[Persona-sama]

Oh man, thanks guys! I'm still thinking it over and probably won't get around to buying one until a few months later so I have time to wait and see if new developments pop up.

Like what someone mentioned earlier, it might make more sense just to go for a box that I could swap in a better video card for since I won't be doing much on it but playing an occasional game or working on prorgrams that'd work better on Windows (ie Maya, After Effects). I must ruminate on this further.


Feel free to turn this thread into a "Pimp my Netbook" thread and show off how tiny/cool your netbook is with photos and cute stories.
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[Wilkes]

I have a 10" eeepc with one 40 gig ssd and one 4 gig ssd for the os. it's black and I have a small piece of cloth from 45rpm adhered over the eee logo.

it's great for most roms, but I haven't tried anything past 16 bit. won't play quakelive. can't get the resolution right for Half-Life. Hulu is a little choppy on normal quality and unplayable in 480p, but reasonable quality video saved to the drive plays clean.

great battery life, nearly 6 hours on a full charge.

I tried installing Word 2007 a while ago and ran into some trouble, but I didn't continue trying because google docs.

[DonMarco]

[Aaron]

[Persona-sama]

DM, that is some sexy covering you're putting on your book. What does it look like before? Is the process hard? It seems like a pretty good way to sexy-up anything that you have as long as it's vaguely square shaped.


Also, just to tell you guys where I am computer-wise, I have a Macbook Pro I got 2 years ago that I use for most of my work. My Windows partition on it has recently gotten ruined because of Parallels fucking up something with the boot, so now I was thinking it'd just be nicer to have a dedicated PC. I'd just use the netbook theoretically for lazy internet browsing, portable movie viewing, gaming on the go, or other some such nonsense. I'm not looking for something to really replace my main 'top, just a little dandy I could have a fling with.

Getting a new box is looking like a really tempting option though.
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[manmachine plays jazz]

[Tulpa]

AS far as running Half-life/other fullscreen games with resolution requirements, you just have to change the video settings from "stretch" to maintain aspect ratio and then you'll have black sidebars but at least it won't look terrible.

I'll try out this GMABooster, if it lets me run Half-Life 1 at more than 20 fps then I am set.
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[DonMarco]

[manmachine plays jazz]

yeah now the eee has this god damned glossy finish and no you will never get all your fingerprints off it

[Takashi]

[Wilkes]

[manmachine plays jazz]

[Wilkes]

[Talbain]

http://wiki.msiwind.net/index.php/Windows_Games

Here's a list of games I found that the MSI Wind can play. I assume most other netbooks can also play them since they all basically use the same processor and similar integrated graphics cards. Also has a list of games that don't work, though pretty incomplete.
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[BenoitRen]

[Toptube]

A netbook with a Geforce 9300 in it will run some games pretty well. but most of them have weirdo resolutions and a lot of games don't like that. Before seriously considering a purchase, I'm going to wait until a netbook comes out that has a 720p ten inch screen with a decent graphics chip in it. Basically I'm waiting for Dell to put a decent GPU into one of theirs.

[Talbain]

Speaking of netbooks, where would you draw the line in terms of screen size? I tend to think of a netbook as something 10.4" or smaller, while 12.1" or bigger is a notebook. Or would you use some other form to decide on what makes a netbook a netbook (maybe battery life or form factor)?
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[kerobaros]

[Internetics]