Another ALDI special

[pmrid (Peter)]

Anyone seen these. Their specs seem pretty good for astro work in the field.
http://aldi.com.au/au/html/offers/2827_14361.htm
Peter

[erick (Eric)]

Thanks, yep, good price.

What about this headlight for $10? Slap some red paint on the LED.

http://aldi.com.au/au/html/offers/2827_14311.htm

[toryglen-boy (Duncan)]

yeah, standard netbook !!

just be aware, that the Canon software suite for your camera, will not install on anything with a res thats less than 1024*768

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

HomeArt have head lamps, 3 in a blister pack for $19.
Tried them out last night.
I'll keep one as white light for packing up, the others I'll be painting red.

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by toryglen-boy

yeah, standard netbook !!

just be aware, that the Canon software suite for your camera, will not install on anything with a res thats less than 1024*768

Most of the 1024*600 notebooks will let you configure the screen as 1024*768 and the screen scrolls to show the top/bottom.

That shuts up the shoddy installers.

You can usually switch back to 1024*600 afterwards if the scrolling annoys you too much.

[hotspur (Chris)]

Those head lamps look ok for $10,had a look at the link,avaliable from stores 15th of July,Might have to get some,I am always misplacing mine.

[supernova1965 (Warren)]

Originally Posted by pmrid

Anyone seen these. Their specs seem pretty good for astro work in the field.
http://aldi.com.au/au/html/offers/2827_14361.htm
Peter

Originally Posted by ZDNET

If you’ve read anything about Windows 7 Starter Edition, your first reaction was probably the same as mine: Is Microsoft nuts? This ultra-cheap edition is intended for use on netbooks, but its biggest restriction sounds like a complete deal-breaker: it only runs three applications at once.

For starters, that three-app limit isn’t as cut and dried as it sounds. Several people who e-mailed me with questions assumed that the limit means you can only have three windows open at once. Nope. At the moment, in fact, I have 16 separate windows open at once (and multiple tabs within some of those windows as well).How am I able to get away with this? Well, for starters, you can open as many windows as you want from a single program. So if you want to open 15 tabs in your browser, six images in your photo-editing program, and a couple of instant messenger windows, you can do it. You won’t see this warning message until you try to open a fourth program:

I got this from a review of Windows 7 starter

[Bassnut (Fred)]

mmm, sounded good as an obs/feild PC until.............

At a minimum, id need The sky, DL, focusmax,TCC (scope/focus contol) and IE (for IIS, natch ;-) and a time syncing app.

mmm, thats 5 programs, bummer. Or 4 without IIS, bummer and boring.

Even more minimum say with a DSLR, would be a Planetarium prog, and Canons interface, would work at a pinch, but does live view and capture count as 2 programs?.

I guess drivers such as ASCOM wouldnt count?

[fhub (Franz)]

Originally Posted by pmrid

Anyone seen these. Their specs seem pretty good for astro work in the field.
http://aldi.com.au/au/html/offers/2827_14361.htm

I have exactly this netbook since about 4 months and I can confirm:
This is really an excellent netbook, I'm very happy with it!
(It's available here in Europe also at ALDI for 299,- EUR)

And about the 2 mentioned 'problems':

1) this 'limitation' of just being able to open 3 programs at the same time in the Starter Edition of Windows 7 is absolute nonsense!
I've just tried it again and even starting 10 completely different programs makes no problems at all.
There have been rumours that Microsoft intended to include this limitation in Win7-Starter, but it seems they have given up this stupid idea.

2) the problem of the small 1024x600 screen size is of course true for almost EVERY netbook, and NO: the graphics driver in the included Win7 does NOT allow to switch to a 'virtual' 1024x768 screen with scrolling capabilities!
There have been such drivers for WinXP, but so far no such driver exists for Win7.
With a registry hack it is possible to use 1024x768 (and even higher) resolution on this netbook, but that's absolutely ugly: it simply compresses the 768 line down to 600 screen lines and so everything becomes so small that's it's really no joy to look at such a screen.

BUT: there is an excellent alternative solution for this small netbook screen problem, which I've found just a few days ago: GiMeSpace!
http://sites.google.com/site/gimespace/

This small (and very cheap) tool gives you a virtual screen of almost unlimited size, and you can simply move (pan/scroll) around with the mouse.
Furthermore you can resize any window to a size even bigger than your real screen.

I'm using this GiMeSpace on my netbook now since a few days and I'm absolutely impressed - this program is definitely a 'must-have' for every netbook user!

Regards,
Franz.

[erick (Eric)]

Originally Posted by jjjnettie

HomeArt have head lamps, 3 in a blister pack for $19.
Tried them out last night.
I'll keep one as white light for packing up, the others I'll be painting red.

Homeart? Looks like we have three of them in Melbourne. That's 3 lights for $1 cheaper than I was going to buy 2. I wonder how much petrol I have to use to find a Homeart store

Update - they seem to be all over Melbourne!

[spearo (Frank)]

I use red cellophane plastic wrapping paper that my girlfriend bought. I think its available in newspaper agencies, art shops or wherever you buy wrapping paper (I wouldnt know being the kind of bad person who forgets everybody's birthdays etc...)
I stick it inside the torch's cover and it always works a treat.

I even used it as a ed screen for laptops but have now given up and just use the screen as is (out of laziness)

frank

Originally Posted by jjjnettie

HomeArt have head lamps, 3 in a blister pack for $19.
Tried them out last night.
I'll keep one as white light for packing up, the others I'll be painting red.

[PeterM]

The ASUS 1005P, a very smart looking machine boasting 11 hrs battery time, I think has the same specs including 250gig HDD etc. I picked mine up from JB Hi Fi for $420. They are all doing great deals as things are slow in retail at the moment. Another interesting bit with Win7 starter is you cannot change the background image on the desktop. I also added a 2gig stick of Ram for $60 from Game Dude, speeds things up considerably but note SkyX Pro is poorly performing on this machine.

PeterM.

[netwolf]

I thin you will find many of these brands are actually OEM ASUS machines. I have a old laptop my wife uses that is essentially a ASUS branded and sold via diffrent retail chains using there own brand name.

I am seriously considering one of these netbooks. The ipad is nice and has a lot of eyecandy but in my opinion i dont like being locked into to a vendor for apps. Netbook with dual boot win7/linux would be nice. The Ipad does look and feel nice though. Ther is some German competion that looks much the same as the Ipad but as yet nothing more than one unit has been shown at a Tech show, the WePad. Or the Asus one also looks nice and slick.

To many toys to chose from.

Regards
Fahim

[pjphilli (Peter)]

Tired of trying to buy cheap stuff at Aldi. Either they "know nothing" or sold out the only one they had when the doors first opened.
Cheers Peter

[erick (Eric)]

Bought two headlights. One I will use as is - the first white light position is very bright.

The second I pulled apart - cut the red wire (just like defusing the bomb in the last seconds on the movies - do you cut the red wire or the blue wire!) which disconnected the bright LED. Big dollop of my red paint on the other white LED. Had to drill out the hole in the cover to take the extra diameter of the painted LED. Put it back together - now I have a faint red LED headlight - neat!

[renormalised (Carl)]

Looks alright....how would it go running guiding and imaging software at the same time. HD might slow it down a bit.