I've played with my daughter's ASUS netbook, and for BIAB, I am sure that the biggest bottleneck will be the processor -- these are single core (generally, there are some dual core) machines with 0.6GHz processors (the slow speed keeps them cool). The memory is solid state, so disc transfer will be fast -- but BIAB doesn't seem to be at all disk intensive, so this really doesn't mean anything. Generally the design emphasizes exactly the opposite of what you would want from a BIAB computer.

I was actually surprised in my tests (click here), but on Win7, all of your cores are used almost equally in BIAB processing (I suspect due to Win7) and this makes a big difference when you use Realtracks (it takes <3 seconds for these to 'compile' on my setup, discussed elsewhere on this forum).

I'm running 4 cores at 3.5GH -- 1 core seems to be about 1/3 the performance of 4 with BIAB. And at 0.6GHz, you should be operating the netbook core at ~1/6th the speed ... so figure at best it will take 12 times as long to process BIAB tasks on the netbook ... and you are going to run that processer at 100% (which is why they get hot). Also, from my daughter's experience, you will go through a couple of netbooks a year if you really use them.

BTW, these are called 'Net'-books, because you are supposed to do all of the computing on the server side of the Internet, instead of on the netbook. These were an offshoot of Nicholas Negroponte's "One child, one notebook' initiative (now the XO notbook) that was designed to provide worldwide client Internet services. Asus and Intel couldn't reach Negroponte's $100 price point, so backed out, and repackaged it as the Netbook-Atom laptops.

Chris

Last edited by westland; 11/06/10 12:15 PM.