Thanks To My UK Readers
My netbook was circling the drain. This was not in the least bit surprising, since in the last year I wrote most of SOUL OF SERPENTS and SOUL OF DRAGONS on that little 10 inch netbook, for a total of over 250,000 words, along with heaven only knows how many other words of miscellaneous writing.
So, it was time to find a replacement. But where was I going to get the money?
Then a check arrived from Amazon UK. That took care of that nicely.
So I got myself this netbook, the Acer Aspire One A0722, specifically because it was on sale at Target. I immediately installed my preferred operating system, Ubuntu 11.10, and sat down to set it up…
…only to have my brand-new netbook freeze up every single time I turned it on.
Bummer. I’ve seen grown men break down and cry over this sort of thing.
But, y’see, I do this sort of thing as a day job. Computer disasters are my bread and butter. I once set up the AV equipment for a politician who was later forced out of office for looting the county pension fund. I talked a man out of spending $1500 on a new laptop with a five-minute fix. I’ve hunted down more lost papers, presentations, and reports than I can recall. I’ve built email servers out of obsolescent junk from a dumpster. I recovered a report from a dying floppy disk five minutes before it was due. I’ve fished more data than I can remember from dying or virus-infected hard drives. I’ve had failures and setbacks (more than I care to remember), but I’ve come out on top more often than not.
So my react to a brand-new freezing netbook was not “oh, crap, I voided the warranty by installing Ubuntu”, but “interesting.”
Some research and a little bit of experimentation revealed the fix. Apparently, to work with Ubuntu, the Asus Aspire One AO722 needs to be configured to attempt to boot off its network card first. Otherwise, the wired Ethernet and the wireless Ethernet cards duel with each other, causing the system to crash. Once that adjustment was made, the netbook worked flawlessly.
And it is a lovely system. The 11.6 inch screen is much easier to use than a 10.1 inch one, yet small enough for easy portability. The AMD Athlon II C-60 processor, mated to the Radeon graphics, offers excellent performance, certainly better than the previous generation of Intel Atoms. And, added bonus – the netbook actually came with two gigabytes of RAM, rather than the advertised 1 gigabyte.
So, thank you, UK readers, for providing the money for this netbook. And thank you to all my readers for reading so many of my books. I hope to use this netbook to write many more books – in fact, I just finished chapter 13 of GHOST IN THE STORM on it.
-JM
Netbooks? *shiver*
Why a netbook over a laptop? Does it really come down to size? Netbooks to me always seemed like the runt of the computer family, hehe.
And speaking of computers: you deal with them alot, is it just job related, or are you a computer enthusiast?
And if you are one (or even if you are not), your main computer rig, what are it’s specs? I mean is it just a work computer, or is it pumped up for gaming?
Actually I have a tech question for you as well: I’m computer savvy to be sure, but you probably know more…outside of servers and whatnot, what is the point of having an eight core (like amd) or even a sixteen core (like Intel’s upcoming stuff) processor? As a gamer myself, I’m quite aware that games have yet to even utilize a six core processor, so is it just because it can be done, or is there a real purpose for the latest and greatest?
“Why a netbook over a laptop? Does it really come down to size? Netbooks to me always seemed like the runt of the computer family, hehe.”
Yes. A small computer is both ideal for my day job and for writing. The 11.6 inch screen is small enough to be portable, yet large enough that I can do book layout on it.
“Actually I have a tech question for you as well: I’m computer savvy to be sure, but you probably know more…outside of servers and whatnot, what is the point of having an eight core (like amd) or even a sixteen core (like Intel’s upcoming stuff) processor? As a gamer myself, I’m quite aware that games have yet to even utilize a six core processor, so is it just because it can be done, or is there a real purpose for the latest and greatest?”
It depends on whether or not a specific program is written to be multi-threaded. If it is, a single program can take advantage of multiple cores for faster processing, and therefore run much faster than on a single core. Even without multi-threaded applications, a multi-core processor can juggle concurrent tasks much more easily. So if a single program (like Flash player or antivirus) happens to max out the processor, it will only hog one of the processor cores, leaving the others free to handle other tasks.
Yes that is all true, but when so little out even utilize a 6 core, what on earth is the point of a 16 core, lol. I guess I just think it’s a bit on the overkill side 😀