19 Mar 2013

Low cost netbooks and ReadyBoost

http://content.hwigroup.net/images/products/xl/132431/asus_eee_pc_x101ch_black.jpg

At the moment www.amazon.uk has a very good deal (£173) on the little 10 inch Asus X101CH netbook.  Reviews are mixed, but overall this may fit the bill for a small second PC that can be used to run simple (Windows software) tasks without much multi-tasking.  It should also be able to run WSPR or Spectran as long as nothing much else is required at the same time. There is a lot of bloatware supplied which probably slows it down for most novice users. With ReadyBoost installed on an SD card I think the 1GB of RAM should be less of an issue.

My question is have readers of this blog any experience of using ReadyBoost to speed up sluggish netbooks? Also, have any readers actually got an Asus X101CH and, if so, any views on its suitability for (single task) use with WSPR, Spectran or similar?

5 comments:

LY2SS said...

I have the very same notebook - X101CH. Rodger, do not buy this one. It's has Atom chipset onboard and drivers (win7) for them are very very poor quality.
I doubt if Intel will improve them - something is wrong at the hardware level.

(http://communities.intel.com/thread/31591?start=0&tstart=0)

I constantly have USB/wifi transfer problems.

Nevertheless I have acceptable performance with it in latest xubuntu version. (wifi and usb slowdowns still exists).

As I said I wouldn't buy Atom again. And I thought this could change my aging eeepc701... but I think that one was much much more reliable and quicker despite it's lower CPU clock.
What a shame Intel!

LY2SS said...

Speaking about it like a small windows (or even linux) appliance running soundcard based digimodes - it has potential but I would do a test drive with software you're going to use before buying it...

Roger G3XBM said...

Do you know if your X101ch will run WSPR or Spectran?

73s Roger

LY2SS said...

I'll try to test these today.
So far I seen two strange things:

1. As using internal microphone all the audio spectrum above 3kHz is like cut with the knife when seeing in Spectrum lab or fldigi. I haven't seen nothing similar before - it's like digital filter!
Don't know how it will behave with external audio. (NB: it has combo audio jack)

2. I don't know how about spectran but spectrumlab works slower (comapring to eee701) on 101CH. Looks like slow spectrum graph refresh rate. I suspect it is related with video drivers perhaps.

LY2SS said...

Confirming - spectran and wsjt work in windows7. I can't judge how good they are in real world - I don't have good antennas at the moment.

73!