fic ce268 laptop

[Hetz Ben Hamo]

Hi Didi,

4 words: Stay away from this!

The machine is based on an old VIA CPU and chipset. The fan makes *tons* of
noise, and you might burn your laps, since it's power management sucks.
5 hours battery life? sure, if you shut down the screen and the hard disk.

I remember reading about a similar machine (they all have the same part,
same build, same design, just different lables). It is *utterly slow* piece
of junk. It's webcam really sucks and skype (specially the latest one for
linux) will crawl with it. How slow is this machine? try this: Celeron
600Mhz is way faster.

I would not recommend buying this. If you're going to buy a netbook, buy
something with an Atom processor that has good battery life. Today, the
average ASUS or MSI netbooks with Atom can achieve about 10 hours from the
battery (9 cells), and they can run Skype well and you'll get
full compatibility for all the hardware inside with any modern Linux
distribution, be it Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL/CentOS, SuSE, Mandriva etc..

It costs more, around 2.5 times more (depending on your negotiation skills
with the seller), but as an owner of Asus eee 1000HE I can say it worth
every Shekel and it saved me couple of times. I just came back from Zefat
and surfed the net on the bus going to Zefat and back home without any
charge, and that include 3G connectivity and charging my E72 from the
netbook. Not bad..

Hetz

2010/8/14 Yedidyah Bar-David <linux-il at didi.bardavid.org>

> Hi all,
>
> I am considering buying a FIC CE268 laptop, and would like to get reviews
> about it from current users of it.
>
> It's a low-profile "netbook", costs 699 NIS in officedepot:
> http://www.fic.com.tw/product/ce268.aspx
>
> http://officedepot.co.il/catalog/catalogSku.do?id=4236592&pr=QJ5&N=2%2032937&sgID=10
>
> Does it work well? Is all the hardware working well? Sound? USB? Webcam?
> Wireless? How long does the battery hold?
>
> Does it seem to have reasonable quality? Can I expect it to work for more
> than the 1 year warranty they provide?
>
> What distribution of linux does it arrive with? Does it support Hebrew
> well (i.e. as well as other current common distros)?
>
> Is the webcam giving good pictures in linux? I recently used two different
> USB webcams that worked well in Windows and in linux did work rather well
> but gave a too dark image, with no apparent solution.
>
> Does it work well in skype? That is, like a faster "normal" linux PC?
>
> Is the keyboard comfortable enough for touch-typing? I do not expect to
> type a lot on it, thogh.
>
> Does it run hot after several hours of use?
>
> Suggestions from current users of other similar small/cheap
> laptops/netbooks that are easily bought in a store in Israel with local
> support/warranty are also welcome.
>
> TIA,
> --
> Didi
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>


-- 
my blog (hebrew): http://benhamo.org
Skype: heunique
MSN: hetz-blog at benhamo.org
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