PC World pips Asus to UK Atom sub-laptop premier

Who has the first SCC with Intel's new chip?

By Tony Smith, 4th July 2008

PC World today claimed to have beaten Asus to the punch by launching the first Small, Cheap Computer in the UK equipped with an Intel Atom processor.

PC World's Advent 4211: out ahead of the Eee 901?

PC World's own-brand Advent 4211 sub-notebook is essentially MSI's Wind rebadged. It's got a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB of DDR 2 memory and an 80GB hard drive that's pre-loaded with Windows XP.

The laptop sports a 10.2in display with a 1.3-megapixel camera in the bezel. It has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth on board.

With its three-cell battery, the 4211 weighs in at an eminently portable 1.12kg.

Compact

But the price is a weighty - for an SCC, at least - £280.

PC World claimed the 4211 was launched today, but a trip to the company's website shows an "estimated release date" of 7 July.

Asus' Atom-based Eee PC 901 was due to have gone on sale on 1 July, but doesn't appear to have made it out of Asus' warehouse yet. If Asus can get the machine in the shops before Monday - and PC World sticks to its published timeframe - the Eee maker will have got there first.

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Posted Friday 11th July 2008 08:02 GMT

Vance P. Frickey

280 pounds ain't bad for an Atom laptop...

That works out to about US$560, which is below Asus's price for the Atom version of their Eee laptop (they need to work on that name, BTW - it brings to mind images of housewives standing on kitchen chairs when a mouse shows up). The Atom-packing Eee runs a bit more than US$600.

Posted Wednesday 9th July 2008 14:09 GMT

Anonymous Hero

Freetards....jeez

@ The freetards...

For an OS that has just 2-3% (and dropping) of the desktop market and for some pretty valid reasons...Gnome/KDE = shite, distro fragmentation (I mean, how many variants of Ubundoo do we really need, and please don't give me some crap about choice, that doesn't even begin to forgive the distro mess) the racket and demands their greetin' faced evangelising bairns make about not having to pay the MS tax always makes me pish ma self with laughter.

So why not take this to the ultimate end. If you're fed up with paying the 'tax' why not demand that you have a freetard BIOS so you're no payin' out a fraction of the cost of the machine to AMI or Phoenix or whoever in licensing....oh and how about the licenses on all the proprietry hardware and microcode on the mobo's. Or how about having a wee moan and greet aboot how awful Intel are for dominating this particular niche with their Atom processor.

FFS...grow up. You're all just the OS equivalent of the chattering classes, me, I'll stick with a machine with XP. You never know when some freeturd breaks the upstream distro and like hey seeds in a broken crypto lib.

MS are such an easy target, but how do you know your shiney new toy isn't being boxed up by slave labour and employed in factories with shitty workers rights? How about having a wee protest about that instead and choosing a manufacturer that gives a shit and has a social conscience?

Yeah...grow up, go have a life, get a girlfriend, have sex, drink beer, have a wash and get outa yer mummies basements and see the sun and the real world once in a while.

Oh finally....I bought an Asus EEE 1000H with XP cos I neither give a shit about MS abusing their monopoly position (they pay my wages, and rather handsomely too) nor do I care about the exploited workers who boxed and shipped my new toy to the UK in some ozone destroying cargo plane or boat. And you know what I love to rub it under the noses of all you politically correct brainwashed opensource plastic bag recycling bozo's. Oh hell yeah!!!

In the words of Daniel Plainview "I'm finished now".

Posted Tuesday 8th July 2008 23:06 GMT