Tom’s Reviews

This review was written on an Everex gBook.

There are pros and cons to the Everex 15.4″ gBook VA1500V Laptop PC w/ VIA C7-M Processor, but bottom line I’m not sending it back! The biggest pro is the price - $399 at Walmart.com with free “Site to Store” delivery (which took two to three weeks, 40 miles from Wal-Mart’s Bentonville headquarters and distribution center). Total price with sales tax was under $425.

The biggest con is that the hardware isn’t fully supported by the Ubuntu linux distribution or the Everex flavor of Ubuntu “gOS”. When I first got the machine it was loaded with gOS and the screen resolution was set to 1440×900 (it does have a nice crisp, widescreen display). The computer was advertised as having “Additional Preinstalled and Linked Software -
Mozilla Firefox, gMail, Meebo, Skype, Wikipedia, GIMP, Blogger, YouTube, Xing Movie Player, RythemBox, Faqly, Facebook and OpenOffice.org 2.3 (includes WRITER, IMPRESS, DRAW, CALC, BASE.” Skype was important to me, as the main reason I wanted a laptop was to be able to communicate effectively from the road and I’ve got a fully paid up Skype Pro subscription, SkypeIn number, headset and the whole nine yards. Well, the gOS installation didn’t include Skype. Skype was nowhere to be found in the “Add/Remove Programs” or by going directly to the Synaptic Package Manager (too technical already - this is probably not your best bet, but It’s worth noting at this point that Everex has Windows notebooks available for a couple hundred dollars more, such as the Everex 13.3″ StepNote SR5210T Laptop PC w/ Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T5250). The version of Ubuntu that was masquerading as “gOS” was the last version, so an attempt to download Skype for Linux and install it was unsuccessful.

So, I called tech support. The first guy told me I needed to download the gOS OS from the Everex support site, burn a CD and reinstall it. (The computer came with no CDs to reinstall the software.) The site specified that I needed to burn a DVD, not a CD. Since the computer only had a CD-burner and I didn’t want to waste 12 hours downloading, I called back. They assured me a CD would be fine. It wasn’t. The install was too big by over 100 meg. I got an external DVD burner and hooked it up to a different computer and burned the DVD. Reinstalled the OS and found myself stuck with a 640×480 screen resolution that looked horrible. Couldn’t find the correct display driver and have no documentation, so I called tech support again. The guy at tech support didn’t know what the correct driver was. He walked me through a fairly extensive procedure of shell commands that accomplishes nothing.

Everex 15.4″ gBook VA1500V Laptop PC w/ VIA C7-M Processor

Finally he suggested downloading a different version of the OS, one intended for the ultramobile Everex 7″ CloudBook CE1200V Ultra-Portable Laptop w/ VIA C7-M Processor ULV. It didn’t work either. Just for fun, I tried the version of the OS for their “MyMiniPC,” that linked to MySpace, YouTube and lots of other fun stuff. It was fun to play around with, but even after I managed to find and install an opensource display driver, it still didn’t work quite right.

Then the big explosion happened. The automatic update feature told me I should upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu. I told it okay and a day later, the computer wouldn’t boot. This is the second time I’ve had this problem with an “automatic” upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, so it’s a fault in Ubuntu or in my handling of an “automatic” update, not a gBook problem. On the other computer, I just went back to all Windows, all the time. On this one, I wanted to run Linux, so I downloaded a full Ubuntu install from the Ubuntu site, burned a DVD and installed it. It works great. The display drivers still aren’t 100%, though I do have the right screen resolution at least. I can’t take advantage of some of the features of the display or the graphics processor in Ubuntu and as far as I can tell won’t be able to take advantage of them in any OS other than Windows.

So, the big negatives:

• Doesn’t come with Skype and just won’t run Skype as configured.
• Linux version packaged with the computer isn’t that great.
• Almost completely unsupported - the tech support guys at Everex are great, but they don’t have any information at all on this product to refer to.
• Nice little display, but graphics aren’t fully supported.
• Minor things aren’t fully compatible, or at least fully enabled, in any version of Linux, which is odd for a laptop marketed with a Linux OS.
• Could use more memory and the support website and Everex store website don’t even tell what type it takes.
• Poor battery life. I haven’t fully run it down, but I left it with the screen on and a BitTorrent download running and it ran out 20% of the battery in about 15 minutes. The display icon says that fully charged I have an hour and five minutes run time. That is actually running, though not running hard.
• The touchpad gets in the way when typing. You hit the space bar and the cursor jumps because you brush it. This is a laptop problem generally. I need to figure out how to disable the touchpad. (I’m using a Logitech USB mouse and it works fine.)
• Not for the tech challenged.

I do want to note one thing on that last point. A few reviews I saw of this machine complained that it didn’t run Yahoo/MSN/AIM, etc. Seriously, if you can handle doing the Ubuntu install, which is actually really easy if you just go to Ubuntu.org, you can run all of the above using a program called Pidgin, that is included in the basic Ubuntu distribution. There are also plenty of other alternatives. Yes, you can’t go to the Yahoo Messenger home page and download the Windows version and expect it to work, but you can communicate on Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MySpace IM, Google Talk, MSN, Jabber and a number of other IM networks with very little trouble.

You can also play Second Life, but the download is pretty big. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ll update when I do. You can play Second Life, but without extra memory it’s not going to work well. It comes up with a message that it doesn’t meet the minimum requirements. The current drivers for video probably won’t work well with it either, though the extra memory may help with that (the video card shares memory with the system RAM).

And you can run many Windows programs using WinE (Windows Emulator). I tried a couple and they ran fine, but neither my USB mouse nor the touchpad seemed to work right with them. If I had a Windows program I absolutely had to have, I’d research that more. The only Windows programs I can’t replace with completely free software on this machine are Amazon Unbox and Audible Manager. (Skype for Linux won’t do video calls and the IM programs will only do text chat, not voice or video, though.) The computer comes with a full office suite already installed and the new install of Ubuntu that I did included the same suite (OpenOffice).

Pros:

• Price. At $399, this is the cheapest laptop - period. Ironically, the next cheapest Linux laptop runs $400 more.
• Security. Linux is much more secure than Windows and the processor on this laptop has features to enhance security further - though I haven’t bothered with the software to enable the features.
• Quick. The machine runs fast, though that’s as much a feature of Ubuntu compared to Windows as the hardware. That’s why I wanted a Linux laptop.
• Light. It’s very lightweight. Very portable as long as you have power.
• It’s green(ish). See the comment about battery life. The CPU is a low power, low heat unit and there is no fan [There is a fan, it’s just exceptionally quiet.] Still, it obviously pulls a bit of power to run the battery down that quick.
• Cool. Literally, cool temperature. You can actually use this in your lap, unlike most laptops.

Overall, this is a great price on a good product. It’s a good value for the money. The tech challenged would do well to go the extra couple hundred for one of the Windows OS products from Everex. If the display size and full size keyboard aren’t issues, Linux fans might want to go with the Cloudbook which has a little better support and seems to be fully utilized by the OS. But, for a full sized laptop that can be up and running with the latest Ubuntu version in a half hour (if you do it from the start), this is still a great buy.

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