Thanks for the tip, Rod, even if it is a long shot. As you may guess from the length of this post, there is news.
The general situation here is... not yet bad, but not good. Loans from Bank of Family are not in the immediate future, so no build-it-myself brring the contest. That's bad.
I'm obviously on something more capable than the PSPotato, so that's good.
It's the $200 Acer Chromebook. That's bad. It's a 1.1ghz 32bit system, and there's nothing you can do about that despite being based on 64bit hardware. It also has a whopping 16gb SSD and 2gb RAM, which you can't do anything about without voiding the warranty, so not for three months at least even to pop in the lappie's RAM.
You can ditch Google Spyware Suite for everything but playing Flash stuff, by installing an Ubuntu chroot with crouton. That's good, it means I can run real software.
Performance is in the neighborhood of the seven year old tablet I was using for a while this time last year, until it fried its graphics chipset. That's bad, very bad. I can barely work with 12k faces in Blender, for example, before the FPS dips into single digits when trying to rotate the view around the model. Rendering animations bigger than a playing card is right out.
I was also able to get an external enclosure for the deceased computer's hard drive, so I have all the files I'd been working on and so on, and my music library. That's very, very good. Losing that work was SERIOUSLY stressing me out - the optical drive had cut out January 2011 or so, so there wasn't any way to do meaningful backups.
It has no optical drive. That's technically bad, but I'm used to it. An external drive isn't very expensive, but... yeah.
The screen gets up to 1600ish x 1100ish resolution, which is good... ish. It's pretty small, though, so that makes text tiny and certain interface elements (like the single-pixel border to resize windows) bastardly hard to line up, even with a mouse. Hitting them with the touchpad would be murder.
The keyboard is mushy, and there's no way to turn the touchpad off with an external mouse connected, so I keep nudging it with my thumb or palm and tapping outside - or worse, in the middle of, above the line I'm working on - the text box when typing. That's bad.
It's an Acer. I said it already, but it bears repeating: that's bad.
I got my full set of tools installed in only twice the time as it would take on a Mac or a Windows machine, which is good considering that it is a new OS I'm interacting with.
While not completely impenetrable, working in the command line when it's completely unfamiliar and a stripped-down system to fit the limited hardware and missing many of the things the web references tell you to do, is somewhat baffling. I havfen't yet screwed anything up so badly that I had to turn off Developer Mode and let Chrome OS erase the foreign code and start over, at least. That's good.
I don't have to deal with the PSPotato for anything but playing games, unless I want to. That's very, very good.
Still, overall, it evens out to being a regrettable purchase, softened by having learning the new OS as a distraction, the fact that it's small and cute if underpowered and elegantly designed to do a few basic tasks without fuss or large expenditure of resources, like the original Volkswagon Beetle, and the ability to get things done even though they happen slowly. It's going to itch at the back of my mind every time I use the damn thing that I could have had a real computer, but...
Pretty much, I'm making myself consider it as a replacement for my old PDA, to have a favorable comparison in mind. THe screen is six times bigger, much brighter, and has a somewhat higher dpi, it has RAM instead of a partition on the flash memory (still only 16gb of that, though) and runs about two orders of magnitude faster, with many more software options even without the Linux install (technically, there's probably a version for ARM3 mobile devices too, though hardly practical) and while it won't fit in a pocket it's no bigger or heavier than a decent hardcover, and thinner than many. It doesn't have a CF card reader, but I have a USB one and there's an SD slot. In 2008 I would have jumped on it in a heartbeat!
Gah, I need to get to sleep, to much puzzling the past coule days, my puzzler is sore. Apologies to Dragonflight and the Chrono Racer crew who stop in here too, but I'm too wiped out to even check there tonight. Tomorrow, after I wake up, I swear, now that I have this thing kicked into a useable shape.
I'm still going to hope things somehow turn around enough to make getting the parts I picked out and building a more capable machine. If that does happen, I'll most likely trade this to my father (reverted to fuddleproof pure ChromeOS) as part of the deal - the SD slot will fit the card from his camera, and otherwise he's pretty much the target demographic every way around in terms of the things he wants to use a computer for, on those occasions he wants to use a computer at all.
I think any of us can attest that the things a person wants to do on the computer increases the more time they have to fool around on the internet, though.
So anyway, that's the status update, melancholy as it is.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
The general situation here is... not yet bad, but not good. Loans from Bank of Family are not in the immediate future, so no build-it-myself brring the contest. That's bad.
I'm obviously on something more capable than the PSPotato, so that's good.
It's the $200 Acer Chromebook. That's bad. It's a 1.1ghz 32bit system, and there's nothing you can do about that despite being based on 64bit hardware. It also has a whopping 16gb SSD and 2gb RAM, which you can't do anything about without voiding the warranty, so not for three months at least even to pop in the lappie's RAM.
You can ditch Google Spyware Suite for everything but playing Flash stuff, by installing an Ubuntu chroot with crouton. That's good, it means I can run real software.
Performance is in the neighborhood of the seven year old tablet I was using for a while this time last year, until it fried its graphics chipset. That's bad, very bad. I can barely work with 12k faces in Blender, for example, before the FPS dips into single digits when trying to rotate the view around the model. Rendering animations bigger than a playing card is right out.
I was also able to get an external enclosure for the deceased computer's hard drive, so I have all the files I'd been working on and so on, and my music library. That's very, very good. Losing that work was SERIOUSLY stressing me out - the optical drive had cut out January 2011 or so, so there wasn't any way to do meaningful backups.
It has no optical drive. That's technically bad, but I'm used to it. An external drive isn't very expensive, but... yeah.
The screen gets up to 1600ish x 1100ish resolution, which is good... ish. It's pretty small, though, so that makes text tiny and certain interface elements (like the single-pixel border to resize windows) bastardly hard to line up, even with a mouse. Hitting them with the touchpad would be murder.
The keyboard is mushy, and there's no way to turn the touchpad off with an external mouse connected, so I keep nudging it with my thumb or palm and tapping outside - or worse, in the middle of, above the line I'm working on - the text box when typing. That's bad.
It's an Acer. I said it already, but it bears repeating: that's bad.
I got my full set of tools installed in only twice the time as it would take on a Mac or a Windows machine, which is good considering that it is a new OS I'm interacting with.
While not completely impenetrable, working in the command line when it's completely unfamiliar and a stripped-down system to fit the limited hardware and missing many of the things the web references tell you to do, is somewhat baffling. I havfen't yet screwed anything up so badly that I had to turn off Developer Mode and let Chrome OS erase the foreign code and start over, at least. That's good.
I don't have to deal with the PSPotato for anything but playing games, unless I want to. That's very, very good.
Still, overall, it evens out to being a regrettable purchase, softened by having learning the new OS as a distraction, the fact that it's small and cute if underpowered and elegantly designed to do a few basic tasks without fuss or large expenditure of resources, like the original Volkswagon Beetle, and the ability to get things done even though they happen slowly. It's going to itch at the back of my mind every time I use the damn thing that I could have had a real computer, but...
Pretty much, I'm making myself consider it as a replacement for my old PDA, to have a favorable comparison in mind. THe screen is six times bigger, much brighter, and has a somewhat higher dpi, it has RAM instead of a partition on the flash memory (still only 16gb of that, though) and runs about two orders of magnitude faster, with many more software options even without the Linux install (technically, there's probably a version for ARM3 mobile devices too, though hardly practical) and while it won't fit in a pocket it's no bigger or heavier than a decent hardcover, and thinner than many. It doesn't have a CF card reader, but I have a USB one and there's an SD slot. In 2008 I would have jumped on it in a heartbeat!
Gah, I need to get to sleep, to much puzzling the past coule days, my puzzler is sore. Apologies to Dragonflight and the Chrono Racer crew who stop in here too, but I'm too wiped out to even check there tonight. Tomorrow, after I wake up, I swear, now that I have this thing kicked into a useable shape.
I'm still going to hope things somehow turn around enough to make getting the parts I picked out and building a more capable machine. If that does happen, I'll most likely trade this to my father (reverted to fuddleproof pure ChromeOS) as part of the deal - the SD slot will fit the card from his camera, and otherwise he's pretty much the target demographic every way around in terms of the things he wants to use a computer for, on those occasions he wants to use a computer at all.
I think any of us can attest that the things a person wants to do on the computer increases the more time they have to fool around on the internet, though.
So anyway, that's the status update, melancholy as it is.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows