Advent 4211 mini notebook

PCWB

Guys, you can get 4211 for 220GBP from PC World Business, and for the savings, buy a 6-cell Wind battery to have a ~5h lifetime. So how does THIS sound? :)

advents are pieces of shit

i've had the worst experience with their line... overheating issues, CRAP screens, keys that pop off.. they're not even worth talking about. very asda smart-price.

Re: almost there...

Yup. Totally agree with you Bronek.

"We reckon you'll soon be able to buy an extended battery for less than that." - El Reg

Tell us more... At double the battery life, and under £300 I'd be all in.

Over the past 12+ months, I've been eagerly anticipating a series of machines but they've all failed in a major way when it comes to the crunch:

EEE 701 - Screen limitied it to toy status.

EEE 901 - 701's screen issues were sorted, but other spec boosted and so was the price.

Aspire One - Battery.

And now, the Advent teases us with the HP-Mininote-alike screen and keyboard. And the performance looks as good as ever. All for a reasonable price. But it still fails on the battery issue.

When I shell out for a SCC/netbook/laptot, it'll have the following spec:

---> Price of less than £299.99 (I started out with a £200 limit, which grew to £250 with an expanded wants list, but £300 is as much as I can justify for the convenience of portability)

---> Minimum 8.9" / 1024 screen (10" and/or 1280 would be a bonus, so feel free to make 'em an option at a premium if you want)

---> 4 hours of battery life with g Wi-Fi turned on (go on then, 3 hours at a push, if the recharger is like a mobile phone plug and you meet all the other requirements)

---> XP without the "free" MS Works trimmings and other bloat (I know that XP will run my progs. I know that Linux does not and does not offer an alternative prog. And no Wine-ing at the back from those that want to tinker. Let's have a "Minus XP for £xx less" option and we can all be happy.)

---> 1GB RAM (if you meet all the other requirements I'll accept 512MB as long as it's user-upgradeable without voiding the warranty)

---> 1.6GHz CPU (likely to be an Atom in order to achieve battery life but I'm not really fussed).

---> Keyboard and trackpad to match MSI/Advent/Mininote (I got hands on with the Aspire One over the weekend and the button placement wasn't a real issue but the keyboard & trackpad are just a tad too fiddly.

---> Max 1.5kg weight

---> Storage can be anything from 12GB-ish. SSD, HDD, whatever. As long as it's robust enough for the job and it doesn't impinge on the above battery or weight considerations. I don't need to store vastlibraries of files

---> Built-in 3G would be the icing on the cake and, as time goes by, is in danger of joining the above list as a requirement.

If you can't match that spec you can't have my cash. I can wait.

And with every passing week the launch of the Dell draws nearer...

Though if that fails to hit the spot (delivery inclusive), perhaps I'll end up with a second-hand Mini-Note.

@ Pawel

>Get 4211 for 220GBP from PC World Business"

"Not in stock". But fair enough - I'll keep an eye out.

>"Buy a 6-cell Wind battery to have a ~5h lifetime."

Ho much / where from?

>"So how does THIS sound?"

Pretty good, tbh. If the above two issues could be resolved.

Only advent in name

For people that don't like advents, this is an MSI wind in all but name. If you take it apart (as I did to change the network card for OSX) you will see it is a wind. I have used every day for over a month and it is a great machine. It replaced an eee 701, which for me the keyboard makes unusable

Scrolling Touchpad

I'm currently using one of these machines and just thought I should mention that the touchpad does actually support speed scrolling.

If you tap the top or bottom right of the touchpad the system interprets it as one click of a scroll wheel. If you tap and hold, the machine will scroll until you release.

Not even 'E' for effort

This is going totally in the wrong direction and doesn't begin to meet my criteria.

I want 7-8 hours battery life, under £250, Linux. Until I can get that my money stays in my pocket.

Inevitable

I await the plug for the eupeople "discussion" thread of reprinted reg articles. :-)

Page 4

Your Gimp test results states that a longer bar is better, I would have thought that the less time it takes to render the blur is better?

Don't worry the pedant squad is here to keep you right.

Love mine!

Well I went from a 701 EEE to the Advent. The EEE was great but the screen was just TOO small. The Advent is great - I have had an Advent laptop before and had no trouble whatsoever with it and having read that the Advent was just a re-badged MSI Wind, I figured I'd not have too much trouble with hardware. Correct - no problems at all.

Screen is great, keyboard is great, easy to upgrade the RAM (have 2GB now) and easy to replace the HD (am going to buy a WD Passport external HD....maybe 250GB....and do a straight swap).

Me - I'd recommend it.

I've had one for two weeks and...

...it's well worth the money. When it comes to usability the eee's and the Aspire's don't cut it for me. One of my basic requirements is that I'm able to properly touch-type on the thing. If someone as tiny as Veronica Belmont (see the latest Tekzilla) can't even touch-type on an eee then there's no hope for the rest of us.

The larger screen and keyboard might reduce "portability" (yeah, carrying this thing around is a REAL strain), but it's still small, still light, and it's nice to use. The upshot of all this is that I regard my Advent as properly portable but still a real computer and my eee as an expensive, vaguely annoying, toy.

The fact it's not a SSD could be seen as a downside, but on the up it means I can load the thing up with a ton of movies and tv for watching on flights and on holidays etc.

My only gripe with the thing is the battery life; though I knew the two hours of use wasn't going to be enough before I bought and I'm treating the 3-cell it shipped with as a replacement battery.

If you want a machine you can sling in a bag and TRUELY forget about, but which still does everything you want and isn't a pain to use then you should get one of these.

I've had one for almost a month...

Bought from PC World, and I agree it's well worth the money.

The screen is very bright and clear; the keyboard is large enough to be usable over extended periods of time, even with my large hands; and it runs Windows XP with the applications I need without too much difficulty.

Serious ladies and gents, try one of these out before you shoot it down.

Would have liked it

As the review says -- the Sentelic pad was a showstopper. The shipped Windows image doesn't some with drivers, and even if you want to run Windows on it the in-store staff don't have drivers. So have fun with your tap-to-click clicking about every three keystrokes.

The wireless card is a piece of junk (Realtek 8187) -- if that was the only problem, I'd have just replaced it with an Intel 3945, but the trackpad made the Wind extremely painful, despite the schw33t keyboard and screen. So back to PC World it went.

I've got one

The trackpad was a show stopper for me and after going through about 10 of them in the shop trying to find a "working" one the manager agreed to give me their display model - and I'm really happy with it. Sentelic drivers are now available so you can disable tap to click and they are promising to release a driver that supports the Synaptics function. I do think the change was a cock up though.

I have Vista and NetBSD on mine. I had OS X on it also for a while it'll run all them happily.

Yes it doesn't have an SSD but thats easy enough to add and you can ebay the old 80G disk. I use the bluetooth with my Windows Mobile TYTN II for high speed net access and it works perfectly.

I just want the 6 cell battery for mine an I'm done.

This is an MSI machine and the build quality is superb for £260. My only downside is that I would like 1024*768 but can live with 600.

Cheers,

Neil.

@W

Last week there were six in stock - they're probably gone now, but I emailed pcworld and asked when they expect it. Battery will be available some time in September: http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/f22/msi-wind-battery-upgrade-coming-57047/

Warrenty

Other reviews have noted the MSI version is £50 more but you get a carry case and 2 year (instead of 1 year) warranty.

I have plenty of bags, and prefer being able to drop into a store should it go wrong, as opposed to waiting at home all day for a courier. Plus I will probably have dropped it within a year anyway.

So better pop down to PC world then hadn't I?!

Warranty - Why PC World can offer it cheaper!

As someone who bought an Aspire One from PC World discovered, they have bought the warranty/support from the manufacturer. If it goes wrong then you are not covered by a manufacturer warranty and instead have to use PC World's "TechGuys" service.

So if it goes wrong you are basically screwed. With that crucial detail in mind, paying £20 extra to purchase elsewhere is a bargin!

This point needs to be covered in the review and potentially in a separate article as a warning to buyers. Those who bought Acer Aspire One's from PC World were at no point told that warranty obligations were not with Acer (who have been highly praised by users with fauly Ones) but with PC World who have a horrendous track record on support.

Re. warranty

I think you are intentionally missing the point there. The quality of service is entirely different. Even if it doesn't change your legal protection you are getting a different product entirely. Who is to say that PC World even match the terms of the manufacturers warranty, there is often a difference between what a manufacturer has to offer under law and what they offer in reality.

With manufacturer support, at least for the Aspire One you can deal direct with Acer who actually know what they are doing, the device is collected, repaired and returned to your door pretty quickly. PC World support - well I shouldn't need to tell anyone here just how bad that can be. It's got to be even worse for those with linux versions who have to deal with the "Tech Guys".