Two Months of Mac Netbook | theKitch

Two Months of Mac Netbook

Published on May 5, 2009 in mac. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’ve been thinking a lot about life with my Lenovo S10 hackintosh netbook as my only system. Recent articles in Lifehacker, TUAW, and Wired got me thinking about it even more.  Most of these folks are going on about 6 months with their Hackintosh netbooks, I’m at two months.  That said I have definitely formed some opinions about the whole thing.  Some good, some bad.  I’ve even been contimplating the purchase of a full Mac Laptop as a replacement.

What it has been really great for is having a fully functioning laptop I can drag around with me anywhere I want in my Tenba bag along with all my camera gear.  I don’t even have to bring the power supply along for a day trip since I invested in a 9 cell battery for it from ebay for 75 bucks.  This is a pretty unstoppable combination for day travel.  I am getting between 7 and 10 hours of battery life in this setup.  Not bad for a little netbook and a cheap knockoff battery.  I also added a Logitech Nano VX mouse to use along with the system as well.  It’s a great match since I can leave the micro reciever in the netbook at all times, very convenient.  I’m also using the netbook hooked up to my 20″ LCD display when at home sometimes.  This is a great setup when I want to do heavy photo editing or work from home.

Overall system performance is OK.  It’s tolerable basically.  It runs Lightroom fine if I am willing to be a little bit patient with it.  I don’t do a lot of brushwork and cloning so that definitely helps, these functions are a bit slower for real artistic work.  I would guess Photoshop would be nearly unusable if I were to try.  It’s great for web browsing with the Safari 4 beta which saves me some screen real estate.  Watching video is a crusher.  It can handle 480p h.264 video and lower quality flash video, but no more.  With 2 gigs of memory it handles multitasking just fine.  I keep Adium, iTunes, and Tweetie open at all times along with a few browser tabs and Lightroom and switching is fine, no issues there.  I have even set up XP in a virtual machine using VirtualBox.  I would say that compared to netbooks running XP performance is actually better, especially for multi-tasking.

Ergonomics is another issue all together.   The keyboard was my main concern initially but this turned out to be almost a non issue.  They layout of the Lenovo S10 keyboard is fine for all but the most intense typing.  The touchpad is worthless for anything but the most basic navigation, thus the cordless mouse.  The screen has also turned out to be a bit of an issue.  At 1024×600 it doesn’t have enough vertical resolution for a lot of apps.  I have to use some scaling trickery to make these work.  Overall, a higher res screen sure would be nice.  I’ve even gone in search of the panel from a Dell Mini 10 “HD” which is 1200×768 or so to see if I could hack it in somehow.  No luck yet.

So in the end it’s still a usable solution.  I think I would really like a real mac though.  The extra screen real estate and the added horsepower would be really great.  Not sure how I feel about giving up the insane battery life that I get right now or the compact size.  There is also the cost.  I’m not limited with what I can do with the Lenovo right now, so I think I’ll just stick with it.

11 Responses to “Two Months of Mac Netbook”

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  • Tyler
    May 6, 2009 at 10:12 am

    I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve had my S10 for a little over a month now and my biggest qualm is the screen resolution. If you find a good source for a “HD” screen let me know and I’ll work out the hack with you.
    I dual boot OS X and Vista. I use Vista for work and OS X for my personal use. In Vista, I’ve found Outlook 2007 to be a little cramped, but most of the other application in the Office Suite have zoom options which helps quite a bit.
    I also have a “dock” setup on my home desk right now. A 20″ monitor running 1600×1200, a universal power supply, and a wired keyboard and mouse hooked up to a USB hub. All those cables connect to the left side of S10 which makes it very easy to connect and disconnect. I’m considering getting a similar setup at my office cubicle.
    One last thing, I’ve installed GMABooster in Windows and OS X. The program overclocks the video processor. It improves Flash video playback but decreases battery life and increases the heat which makes the fan run faster and louder. Typically, I only use GMABooster when I’m connected to the “dock.”
    Cheers.

  • kitch
    May 6, 2009 at 10:45 am

    Thanks for leaving the comment! I will DEFINITELY be looking into the GMA booster when docked and doing things like photo editing. Seems like it could certainly help out.

    Sounds like we have nearly identical “docking” setups. See my earlier post here: http://www.thekitch.com/mac/everyday-mac-netbook
    The monitor has 4 powered usb ports so I have my iphone doc, keyboard and external usb drive for backups setup here. When docked my only want is for a little bit more speed.

  • Tyler
    May 6, 2009 at 11:16 am

    I have a suspicion that the power used to drive the external display slows the system down a little, but the boost in performance GMABooster gives it makes up for that. I can’t wait for the author to take the 7 day time limit off of it.
    Have you look at the Xtand for you iPhone? I think it might be the next “vanity” purchase I make.

  • kitch
    May 6, 2009 at 11:21 am

    That’s why I was very interested in the GMABooster. When hooked up to the external monitor performance for things like expose and especially spaces takes a serious hit. My guess was just that its a result of the significantly increased pixel pushing required. Fingers are crossed.

    That Xtand thing is pretty slick. Although it will look less cool with the dock connector sticking out the side.

    I was going to ask if you have tried the new VoodooHDA stuff for audio. I’m really hoping that the mic stuff is working soon. That would be pretty awesome to have.

    I also haven’t bothered with any two finger scroll hacking for the touchpad simply because I ALWAYS use my little logitech mouse. The extra buttons mapped to spaces and expose makes navigation on the S10 really slick.

  • Tyler
    May 6, 2009 at 12:08 pm

    The VoodooHDA kext is very promising but needs a lot of work still. I haven’t installed it just yet because of the various issues it’s been having. The biggest deal breaker for me is the crackling upon returning from standby. It returns to normal after a reboot, but I still plan on waiting until it’s a little more ironed out.
    I did successfully install the VoodooPS2Controller(touchpad) kext though. Two finger scrolling does work but I ended up disabling it. The letterbox shape of the touchpad meant I was constantly lifting my fingers back to the top of the touchpad to continue scrolling down. If the touchpad was larger it wouldn’t be a problem. Ultimately, I use the arrow keys, PgUp and PgDn to navigate long sites, like blogs.
    I am interested in buying a Logitech Nano VX though. Did you pay retail and have you used it much on different kinds of surfaces (i.e. glossy)?

    • kitch
      May 6, 2009 at 12:12 pm

      That was a tough part of the decision between the Nano VX and the MS blue mice. They track better on wonky surfaces, specifically glass. The Nano has been fine on the table tops I have used it on, including stainless steel. It does not work at all on glass though.

      In the end I chose the Nano VX because of the overall design and ergonomics of the mouse as well as the nano receiver which I just leave in at all times it is so small.

  • Tyler
    May 6, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    I wish the Microsoft BlueTrack had a nano receiver. Best of both worlds.

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  • daniel
    April 2, 2010 at 10:21 pm

    Hi! I have a Lenovo S10-2 with snow leopard 10.6.1 right now. I notice that you have your netbook connected to a Dell Display and set that one as your primary Desktop. I just cant do that. My netbook only give the chance to extend the desktop but the principal tools remains in Lenovo´s screen. I want to use only the external one but the sleep trick doesnt work because every time I close the screen my netbook reboots. Is there any kext patch to solve that? how can you fix this problem? Please help me! i dont want to get back to winblows xp! Thanks!

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