Quote:
Originally Posted by kahunab
Be very careful with these minis. They will load RDSS but the resolution you need to see the full RDSS screen is 1240 X780 and these machines usually come with 1240 X600. It cuts off the bottom part of the RDSS screen. So when you are in the Data Centre and download races you can't get to all of the buttons to process races. Likewise when you look at horses you really can look at only one pane or two with about 3 lines visable. My wife has one of those netbooks and I have tried it.
The program will load but you wont like what you get when you try to run it.  |
Thanks Dick for the hand-on review. I played with a few of these today in the computer store, both Vista and XP, an Acer and a HP mini. Both had 1 Gb memory and 60Gb or 160Gb hard drive, and screen res of 1024 x 600.
There is absolutely enough memory and disk space to run RDSS. In 1 Gb of system memory, XP will run better than Vista. It's the vertical screen resolution of 600 which will halt you right now, as Dick says. The current version of RDSS is not suitable for such netbooks
for this reason only.
One of the main things (aside from memory usage) in the next RDSS version is sizing the screen a lot more flexibly. We have the visual mechanism right now in horses' PPs to display information in 2 or 3 panels depending on screen res. This will change further to
1 or 2 or 3 panels depending on vertical screen size or font size preferences. So a netbook with 600 vertical pixels would have 1 panel with ALL tabs you need - you pick the tabs you want to appear - then just flip back and forth between tabs like you do now. You forego the Analysis tabs in Panel 3 position just like you do now when all you can fit is 2 panels, and access Analysis from the top row of Tabs.
I do think these kinds of
netbooks are a great thing - Tim Y had one with him when we went to Woodbine last summer, using Spec160 on Windows XP in 8Gb of flash memory (i.e. instead of a hard drive). You wouldn't fit RDSS in 8 Gb of flash memory, but some newer ones have 16Gb of flash, which would probably work (again, next RDSS version).
Again, summarizing, RDSS is a memory hog, but not conventional memory (i.e. 1 Gb - 4Gb of system memory), rather Windows allocated internal memory for visual widgets. Mea culpa, mea culpa - but no,
you don't have to give back the winnings... 
Cheers,
Ted