News - Lenovo getting Chromebooks ready for May launch?

[HEXUS]

Because enterprises want them.

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[3dcandy]

That Samsung picture just looks plain wrong!

[jimbouk]

A Core i5 and 4GB ram to run a web browser, am I missing something? I like the Chromebook/box idea and very nearly bought one myself but that spec seems a bit odd.

[CampGareth]

A Core i5 and 4GB ram to run a web browser, am I missing something? I like the Chromebook/box idea and very nearly bought one myself but that spec seems a bit odd.

I guess you've never had huge numbers of tabs open then or opened multiple tabs at once. Depending on your workload it's easily possible to fill 2GB and run out of processing power with lower end processors, I'm playing music through Google Music atm and the music sometimes pauses for a couple of seconds when opening Facebook for instance on a 3.8GHz C2D. I would've honestly said 4GB might be a bit small when you could fit 8GB and be absolutely sure you won't run out of RAM ever, but that's me.

[Biscuit]

Yeah my AMD E450 based netbook is starting to struggle on the CPU front. Seems web content is getting quite a lot richer at the moment!

[kingpotnoodle]

A Core i5 and 4GB ram to run a web browser, am I missing something? I like the Chromebook/box idea and very nearly bought one myself but that spec seems a bit odd.

Browser games, HD video, lots of tabs, cloudy SaaS apps etc... There's more online than forums.

[jim]

Don't forget as well that Google are using Chrome as an application store now, effectively a platform through which to run traditional software.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A Core i5 and 4GB ram to run a web browser, am I missing something? I like the Chromebook/box idea and very nearly bought one myself but that spec seems a bit odd.

Its a Core i5-2450M which is a dual core with HT.

I had a Q6600 with 4GB of RAM and had loads of tabs open,and loads of applications running including image editing application and it was fine. I had both a Core i3 2100 and a A6 3670K with 4GB of RAM and if anything the SSD was the more noticeable addition. I am using a Core i5 quad core and there is no difference to the other CPUs IMHO.

If anything a decent IGP is also useful,as a lot of web browsers seem to use GPU acceleration and so do things like Adobe flash now.

[Wozza63]

A Core i5 and 4GB ram to run a web browser, am I missing something? I like the Chromebook/box idea and very nearly bought one myself but that spec seems a bit odd.

I have 6 tabs open with a video playing and chrome alone is using well over 1GB, I often have considerably more tabs open and it uses over 2GB of my RAM, I have 8GB as well, and of course, the more memory you have the less compression required or less use of hard disk/ssd so it improves the speed

[fail_quail]

A Core i5 and 4GB ram to run a web browser, am I missing something? I like the Chromebook/box idea and very nearly bought one myself but that spec seems a bit odd.

i'm probably an unusual case here, but of the three pc's i use most regularly, i'd rate the firefox speed like this:

1. my desktop - (fx-8120 @4.2ghz, 16GB ram, ssd)
2. my laptop - (e-450 APU @1.6ghz, 8gb ram, ssd)
3. work laptop - (i3-3110M @2.4ghz, 4gb ram, hdd)

Depends on the usage though. on single websites the work laptop beats my little amd laptop, but if i open my 36-tab webcomic list in firefox the work laptop dies and gives up loading 1/3 the tabs after a while whilst the cpu-limited amd laptop manages just fine and a lot faster...

I suspect it's mainly the SSD vs HDD, but could also be the RAM too.

[Tattysnuc]

Regarding the spec, one of the key benefits of not using Windows is the licensing cost. This is for the ENTERPRISE market, so I doubt games and general browsing will be the target application - more likely a link to the company's internet/intranet site and a citrix browser based application to then run remote application in their datacentre, or Google Docs etc.

4gb and i5 seems quite reasonable for that...