let me be first to say...
expensive and crap...
do. not. want.
Computer manufacturers are well known for hyping up their products - "magical", indeed - but few actually fib. Samsung isn't telling porkies, but the sticker on its new X125 overstates with the best of them. Two claims in particular struck me: "Fast booting" and "ultra-thin design". Samsung X125 Samsung's X125: netbook plus …
I find your experience interesting. It is sad to find there are response issues at the level of the user interface.
I wonder could it be the bloat that Samsung loaded the machine with. Ie antivirus software (some as you know are real cpu hogs) and god knows what else.
I can't imagine that much of a slowdown due to a CPU issue solely. My 600 Mhz PIII (1 threaded!) with 512 megs of ram runs xp fine.
If I had that machine, I'd decruft it just to see if it made any difference.
I wish you'd gotten a neo review out sooner! After much agonizing (and pouring over reviews online) I just bought an Acer Aspire One with the same processor as this samsung.
On windows it was a DOG, and booting was a chore. I only dealt with that for about five minutes before I slapped ubuntu on there. Normal ubuntu froze on boot, but xubuntu installed fine for me, and it's quite zippy. Booting probably takes around twenty seconds and applications start quickly enough, though you're right in that it's not very good at multitasking. I didn't really buy it for that, though, the most multitasking I'll be doing is listening to music while writing, so it's OK. The video card rocks, though, and can handle anything I throw at it (some fancy compiz effect, mainly, and the occasional game) without problems.
My main question, then, is how does this compare to a single core intel atom processor? That really seems more like the appropriate competitor than a dual core notebook processor.
... you could get the Thinkpad X100e (model NTS5EUK), which has a dual-core AMD processor and comes with an internal 3G modem card, and has a quality keyboard and choice of pointing devices. It looks remarkably similar in layout to the Samsung. But you lose the HDMI port, and the battery life is worse (maybe 2-3 hours tops).