A number of months ago I bought an Atom 330 (dual core + HT @ 1.6GHz) on the generic Intel board it comes with to use as a file server. I stuck Ubuntu 9.10 on it. So far it's done fantastically in this role and I'm very pleased with it. Hard disks could be quieter though 
Anyway for the last couple of days I'd try it as a casual desktop / web browsing machine just to see how well it performs and - although I already knew this - it's a total dog! It's behavior as a file server is very different to that of a desktop. Even sites like OcUK are sluggish... Flash is also so slow.
I guess I was kidding myself believing that my box was not the same as netbook but I guess it's almost the same thing.
So: how do people get by using netbooks when the performance is like this? And often these netbooks are single core with no HT too!
Anyway for the last couple of days I'd try it as a casual desktop / web browsing machine just to see how well it performs and - although I already knew this - it's a total dog! It's behavior as a file server is very different to that of a desktop. Even sites like OcUK are sluggish... Flash is also so slow.
I guess I was kidding myself believing that my box was not the same as netbook but I guess it's almost the same thing.
So: how do people get by using netbooks when the performance is like this? And often these netbooks are single core with no HT too!
I think I'd also been spoiled by the new Opera which has much faster JavaScript performance than the most recent version which is available on Linux.