TITLE: Atom notebooks
DATE: 2022-01-10
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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Atom Notebook laptops haven't been cool in about 12 years. Even
when they first came out, the low-power Atom CPU had fairly low
performance with software of the time. Now, as the web continues to
bloat up more and more, and desktop applications continue to demand
more and more resources, Atom notebooks really struggle to run a
conventional operating system and common desktop applications,
particularly web browsers. Along with a restrictive Intel Atom CPU,
most Atom notebooks don't have much RAM, normally 1-2 GB. Notebooks
were pushed to the sidelines when the iPad and other tablet PCs
came along, and partly by smartphones, because there was no longer
a need for an ultra-portable laptop with a long battery life.
I now have two Toshiba NB-series Atom notebooks, gifted to me by
people who were going to throw them away. The first I was given is
the Toshiba NB100, and recently I was given a Toshiba NB200.
I've haven't changed any components on the NB100, mainly because I
find it really difficult to use the keyboard. The keys are very
small and cramped, with some dodgy key location choices on the
bottom left and right. The keys are also very squishy. Maybe I
could get used to it, but in reality I will never have need to use
one of these laptops. The NB100 uses a 1.6 GHz N270 CPU, comes with
a 120 GB 5400 rpm hard drive, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, and a 8.9" display.
For the NB200 I found a spare 256GB SSD, and a stick of 2GB DDR2
RAM, so I installed those to see if the laptop would run a bit
faster. It does run quite snappy using a Linux distribution with a
minimal window manager, but running Windows XP is still quite
sluggish. Besides I would never run Windows XP now, as it's been
retired for a few years. The NB200 uses the slightly faster N280
CPU. The keyboard on the NB200 is much easier to use, with a
comfortable amount of space between keys, though still with some
awkward key positions on the bottom right of the keyboard to save
space. The NB200 also looks a lot more modern. It's thinner than
the NB100, and feels less boxy. It's surprising these laptops look
so different given that the NB200 was only released ~6 months after
the NB100, in January and July 2009, respectively. Inside though,
the two models are quite similar.
I tend to install Debian on these old notebooks. There are Debian
i386 images, which are necessary for the N270 CPU which can only
run a 32-bit OS. Debian also has a minimal installer, so I can
choose not to install lots of programs I know I'll never need.
[Debian i386 images]:
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/
For a window manager I tend to default to using i3 or bspwm,
because they are easy to setup and have pretty low overheads.
Occasionally I've dabbled with dwm, but life is too short to pursue
it to perfection.
[i3]:
https://i3wm.org/
[bspwm]:
https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
[dwm]:
https://dwm.suckless.org/
I do like the look of these old notebooks, and I'd love an excuse
to use them, like if I was travelling and didn't have a job and the
only emails I needed to send were to my family and friends. But I
have a decent laptop, and at the moment I spend so much of my day
sat at a desk using a computer it really doesn't make sense to
switch to a different laptop to gain a small amount of portability.
So in the end they are just novelties. Maybe if I have small kids
then I can boot one of them into a TTY to teach them how computers
work.
