I see Michael and sorry I forget who else were mentioning they had just bought themselves a net book recently. I have an old 17inch laptop which I might flog to my mate on the cheap and put the money towards a netbook. My current laptop is a desktop replacement quad core beast that weighs about the same as a small child so im thinking it might be an good to have the option to go uber portable if i don't need the beast. So im just after some impressions on how MOI runs on these netbooks. My concerns would be the screen res and the GPU. RAM and processor seem to be OK I think as most seem to be upgradable to 2GB RAM and I don't think I'd be doing any full scale arch viz work on it but probably more like objects/furniture while im watching TV on the sofa type thing.

I have just put my screen res down to roughly the same size as some of those netbooks and there does seem to be a bit of horizontal scrolling required, is that annoying?

Anyway if anyone has any experience with working with these feel free to chip in.

Thanks
Rob

Hi Rob, well the one that I got is this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220385

That is an ASUS N10J-A1, review of another one in this model line here:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3485

This is at least a couple of hundred dollars more than many of the other netbooks, but still not too expensive as far as laptops normally go, and it is pretty cool for 3D graphics work since it has an actual nVidia graphics card setup in it. The other netbooks generally have the "Intel integrated" graphics systems which are just not really in the same kind of performance level. But if you are not going to do too complex of models on it, it may not really matter. The Intel graphics ones should be able to handle light to moderate kind of models. They're just more likely to get bogged down with heavier models and also don't work particularly well with 3D games.

One other thing to keep in mind with a Netbook is that it has no cd-rom drive, so you need to get an external one if you need to have a CD with it.

It's really pretty cool, the only major thing is the hard drive is kind of slow, I'm thinking of replacing it with an SSD drive.


> I have just put my screen res down to roughly the same size
> as some of those netbooks and there does seem to be a bit of
> horizontal scrolling required, is that annoying?

Actually no - there shouldn't be any horizontal scrolling on the netbook because the UI scale will be set to a smaller size by default when doing the initial install on a low res machine like that.

You can get the same thing with your experiment you tried by going to Options / General / UI size and move the UI size slider to the left a bit until the UI size is small enough to avoid the horizontal scroll bar. You just got a larger default size when you ran MoI the first time since your main machine there was at a higher resolution then.

One of the cool things about MoI is that you can scale the UI to whatever custom size you want, that really helps when working on these low res situations.


- Michael

Thanks for your thoughts Michael. I totally forgot about the scaleable UI, another MOI gem!