I ran boinc (s@h) for a while on my eee-pc until one day I was interrupted, walked away from it and left it running on a hot day. It's never been the same since. It's cooked the hard disk to an unworkable level of reliability (...)

Well, monitoring the temperatures is necessary when running at full load, at least at the beginning and specially if the particular machine is not designed by yourself. And if the heat from the CPU can damage the hard drive, that shows, that this machine had even worse cooling than usual. But as you didn't watch the temperatures (or at least didn't mention it) it's hard to say if the HDD really was running to hot, or was it just one of those drives, which fail quite early.

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I ran boinc (s@h) for a while on my eee-pc until one day I was interrupted, walked away from it and left it running on a hot day. It's never been the same since. It's cooked the hard disk to an unworkable level of reliability and I'm too broke to replace it with the nice ssd that I'd like.
I think that most of the netbooks assume the low power consumption means low heat - which when the environment reaches 40 degrees is not always the case.
Once I had compared the crunch power of my netbook to the crunch power of my desktop i7 with dual gpu's I realised I was really wasting my time. As I really only use the netbook away from my desk, ie on batteries, and the usually wonderful battery life depends on running as economically as possible, boinc becomes less appealing when completing about one work unit a week.
So Atom pc's come in distinctly different flavours. A netbook on batteries seems unwise running boinc, while a miniature pc on mains power in an airconditioned office is clearly a different matter.
The newer pc's seem to be improving dramatically when measured in flops/watt, I did have a couple of old pc's I kept going for sentimental reasons, but soon realised that the money I was spending on power keeping them running was more efficiently spent on shiny new hardware. oops, sorry to rant off track a little there!

Sorry to hear of your problems with your Asus Eee PC. Running BOINC on my Samsung NC10 has not been completely without incident, 2 of the 5 rubber feet have fallen off the bottom of the case, the Microsoft license sticker has become faded and unreadable, and the serial number sticker has also fallen off. More seriously, the CPU fan has recently become a bit noisy, probably due to running constantly at full speed.

I totally agree about running BOINC reducing your battery life as well, my netbook is regularly plugged into either a 240V (UK) supply or a car 12V supply. It should have 6 or 7 hours battery life on a full charge, but I see more like 4 hours if I run BOINC on batteries.

Have you tried to get your HDD replaced under warranty? It seems to me that it may be a design issue if it did overheat.

Keith

Have you tried to get your HDD replaced under warranty? It seems to me that it may be a design issue if it did overheat.

I've not bothered with trying to get it replaced - the place I bought it is easy to buy from but warranty issues can get ugly & I don't need the hassle. What I'd rather do is replace it with a solid state drive and I'm watching the prices regularly. Also trying to build a house so it's a matter of priorities (will have solar array to feed the crunchers more economically and built in ventilation for the pc exhaust)
I'm currently running it off an Ubuntu USB stick and trying to get it to do the same thing of an sd card which would be tidier being internal.
Probably the worst problem is that it is merely unreliable rather than a total failure, it works for 99% of what I do, it's only if I put a load on the hard drive like copy a large video file or something not really suited to a netbook. if it was dead, I'd deal with the warranty guys, as it is it merely makes me grumpy.

Back on the topic of atom's, I only have direct experience with one of them. It is a single core with hyperthreading, which does not actually allow it to do more work on two tasks than one one. The labelling from intel is starting to get murky (recent experience is really in relation to the assorted i5 variants) Are there true dual core atoms?
I would not describe the atom processor as weak but having a very specific design brief which it excels at. You would not pick an atom where what you really want is an i7, but I'm curious about what the i7 laptops are trying to achieve - with batteries that probably weigh more than my netbook in total I would still expect a battery life measured in minutes not hours.

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Probably the worst problem is that it is merely unreliable rather than a total failure, it works for 99% of what I do, it's only if I put a load on the hard drive like copy a large video file or something not really suited to a netbook.

It's quite unimportant if you copy a large file to a netbook hard drive or to server class drive. The difference is the netbook need longer, but it should not fail. If it does, it's broken.

if it was dead, I'd deal with the warranty guys, as it is it merely makes me grumpy.

Hard drive manufacturers have tools to test their drives. A hard drive doesn't need to be completely dead for to be unusable.

For the start you could check the SMART values. I use CrystalDiskInfo for that, it shows the temperature as well.

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. . . A hard drive doesn't need to be completely dead for to be unusable.
For the start you could check the SMART values. . . .

I know it's dead and the Ubuntu netbook remix already has the functionality to report the smart warnings.
My point is that even if I had it replaced under warranty I'd not be happy as I know there is a better way. The main purpose for this machine is to accompany my digital camera and I want to take it places most computers would not want to go to, eg bushwalking etc and would much prefer an ssd.

The drive I would like would cost about 3 hours pay. I imagine that pulling out the paperwork, driving to the store I don't otherwise want to go to, dealing with the service desk, persuading them that there really is a problem on a machine that initially looks ok, leaving it with them, driving back another day to pick it up would possibly take longer than that. A better use of that time would be to work some overtime to pay for the new drive that I really want.
It's all a matter of priorities, I've already decided that one atom is not going to make a significant enough contribution to my boinc crunching to be noticed amongst a couple of i7's with dual gpu's. The effort maintaining it is better spent keeping the bigger machines running.
The most important thing is I'm happy with that.

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Would an Atom be a good companion for my Telescope? Been thinking about getting the parts to view my Telescope on a laptop as my eyes don't like the squinting anymore. Would an Atom be a good choice for the display?

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

Would an Atom be a good companion for my Telescope? Been thinking about getting the parts to view my Telescope on a laptop as my eyes don't like the squinting anymore. Would an Atom be a good choice for the display?

A lot of netbooks have smaller displays. So perhaps not the best choice.

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