DHL landed yesterday with a battered looking cardboard box and a netbook that smelled pretty badly of cigarette smoke, all the rubber feet missing and the tamperproof seals all broken. Needless to say I wasn’t too hopeful, even it it was still £160. It started up nicely and loaded up windows XP well enough and installed Faros, Glen Delahoys Auto FTP. The main useful components to my beacon monitoring station.

I followed it up with IE8 and the logmein client and hey presto after a bit of time (no more than an hour) the replacement unit was installed and running nicely. As the sun seems to refuse to play ball there are no actual spot coming through at the moment apart from the odd one here and there. However, the software seems to be working, the IC703 is clicking through the bands and audio is coming through the system. Perhaps I’m being too negative and it’ll not miss a beat but you can’t help but think that for such a low price it’s going to break down!

If you are interested the spec is:

Intel Mobile N270 Atom processor. 1.6GHz processor speed.1GB RAM.10.1in screen sizeResolution 1024 x 600 pixels.16:10 widescreen.160GB hard drive.Integrated graphics.Shared graphics memory.Media card reader – compatible with MS/SD/MMC. 3 x USB ports. 10/100Mbps Base-T Ethernet ports. 2 stereo speakers sound. 0.3Mp webcam.802.11 b/g wireless enabled. Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition operating system installed. 4 hours battery life.Size (H)3, (W)26, (D)18cm. Weight 1.2kg.

So far I have been really impressed with Net Book Remix. It seems to fit the screen very well, only a few functions didn’t seem to work well. Connecting an external monitor is one of them. I don’t use it often but when I did need it it wasn’t there. Other than that minor niggle (I’m sure there’ll be a way of getting around it but I haven’t had the time to work it out or visit the forums !!) it works brilliantly.

I still use windows on my net top (Acer Revo) and had the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 7 for a small fee and whilst it is a vast improvement over the Vista that it came with I’m starting question what strikes the OS’s apart. So far I have worked on the basis that….

• Both work – Fundamental really but worth pointing out
• Windows is a more polished product
• Ubuntu suits those who may want to tinker
• Ubuntu updates slowly in a continuous improvement / kaizen methodology whilst Microsoft produces innovation type updates – smaller steps versus bigger leaps (sometimes the leaps are in a wobbly direction)
• Software for Microsoft OS’s is great. Ubuntu is good but not quite as good for specialist software (Ham Radio Deluxe springs to mind). Yes, there are alternatives available and no doubt one day they will exceed the Microsoft versions but Microsoft just pips it.

Here’s a question, why can’t the OS’s work with everything? HRD on Ubuntu would probably seal it for me as Office runs under wine.

Fundamentally both the OS’s work for me, just in different applications. My netbook will carry on running Ubuntu. It is running Open Office and Evolution as well as XBMC and a few others like Fldigi on a small screen and it works well. The net top runs Windows 7 for MS Office and HRD, MCE and others. Crucially they both run Dropbox, Picasa and Firefox

I’m still waiting for the cloud to deliver what it promised and then I wonder if I’ll need an OS at all. Especially if it means long battery life and energy efficiency.

For a year or so I’ve owned an Advent 4211. It’s been very good with one exception, the small hard drive is quite small and I / we use it to playback video on journeys in the car for the kids. I installed a simple interface that I used many years ago called myHTPC to make selecting media easier and it seemed to work well. For one reason or another and despite using AVG it picked up a bunch of viruses (virii?) over the year and occasionally fell over. This needed a reinstall of XP using the techguys method. Then after many hours updating and reinstalling software it was back to where it was.

Having done this for the third time in as many days I got the hump with XP and am now running Ubuntu Netbook Remix. A redesigned version of v8.04 with a fancy launcher and some tweaks to make it work better on Netbooks. Guess what it does – Nothing more needs to be said

It has been a really frustrating time trying to get a working PSK-31 set up with this rig and I was beginning to think that it was the rig and not the PC, but after switching things around with our Advent netbook and several copies of Ham Radio Deluxe and using both the ACC socket, RJ45 and speaker output I finally came to the conclusion that the rig is ok but in desperate need of the mic mod.

So what to get? I quite fancy something powerful and a bit useful but also something low energy. Unfortunately the two don’t go hand in hand. I like the idea of the desktop type set ups using Intel Atom processors but it might be worth waiting until the graphics get sorted out with the Ion GPU. Also either an internal or external soundcard will be a must if I’m going to venture into the SDR route with a bit of gusto.

Decisions, decisions

At least the rig is ok

I think I’ll download a copy and see how it works under a virtual machine. Sounds like it could be worth a punt for the shack computer

In addition to this I’ve got a copy of Microsoft live writer for composing blog posts onto this site that also runs off a pen drive.

The number of options is quite large although not all applications are suitable so it’s worth thinking about what you need to do but don’t want to install or can’t install on various machines you use. The Key ones for me are

• Keepass – Password manager
• Microsoft Live Writer – Blog post writer
• Thunderbird – email client
• Open office suite – Complete open source alternative to MS office
• Money Manager – Personal finance software

There are loads more applications to suite all sorts of tastes but I would struggle to live without these now.

Although it does mean that during the remote access part there is a missing few spots, at the moment this doesn’t mean too much but I think in the long term its a small price to pay.

it still astounds me how this system never seems to smoothly upgrade for me. At least this time there wasn’t anything lost on the way through.