Character and Monster Builders with a Solid State Drive?

[King Nate]

I am thinking of purchasing a netbook and I have the option of the normal Hard Drive or the Solid State Drive Flash Module. I am leaning towards the SSD and I have intentions of adding Character Builder and Monster Builder to my netbook but I just want to make sure it will work or does the CB and MB require a hard drive?

Thanks

 

[vagabundo]

An SSD should act the exact same as a harddrive in this situation; windows wont make any distinction.

 

[ki11erDM]

Yea, your OS will make it 100% seamless. You should notice a slight speed increase in the applications loading and them retrieving data from their databases. But after that the only real reason to get the SSD is it is less likely to die when you drop you little lappy. Which you will. Hehe.

What I will say is wait till mid Oct… and get one with Windows 7, it will be well worth the wait.

 

[level1gamer]

The other big reason to get one besides speed and less likely to fail if dropped is solid state drives use less power than traditional hard drives. So, your netbook will last longer between charges. But, yeah, I'd wait for Windows 7, too.

 

[Hawke]

The SSD I purchased has been the most obvious upgrade I've ever done to a computer since I went from 8 megs of RAM to 32 megs.

Be sure to do some google searching about how to optimize windows once you get the drive (things like defrag, indexing, etc should be examined). Windows 7 apparently has a lot of SSD enhancements - I'm running Windows 7 and I love it. Being a netbook owner, it seems likely you might be a student which means you can get Windows 7 for $29.

As far as Character Builder and Monster Builder though - they still are super slow. Funny that every other program I run is screaming fast and launching anything is half a second, but clicking between panels in CB/MB is slow - guess it isn't HD intensive

If can make a recommendation, I suggest this one

 

[Timeboxer]

I tried it on my Mini 9. Results:

1. The Character Builder is very, very, very slow.
2. The screen is way too small to actually let you use the application in certain parts (e.g. inventory management).

Your mileage may vary.

 

[Hawke]

I tried it on my Mini 9. Results:

1. The Character Builder is very, very, very slow.
2. The screen is way too small to actually let you use the application in certain parts (e.g. inventory management).

Your mileage may vary.

I think the OP already has a netbook and was wondering if the SSD purchase would interfere with running it on the netbook. To clarify, the CB probably wont run well on a netbook with or without a SSD - the addition of the SSD to your setup didn't make the CB slower. If I'm interpreting incorrectly, please let me know!

CB/MB run terrible on my fancy ass desktop. Blows me away since it's windows native and pretty much doesn't do anything exciting enough to warrant the slowdown.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

the screen sizes can be changed by the way, for laptops that's a vital thing, thus stopping you from just getting a tiny strip of scrollable magic items
change ZOOM PERCENT in prefferences

 

[King Nate]

Thanks for the responses guys.

To clarify, I do not own a netbook yet. I’m looking to purchase one. I am really computer illiterate when it comes to a lot of this fancy talk. For example I had no idea what this windows 7 thing was until it was mentioned here and I googled it.

The netbooks I’m looking at all have a 10” screen which according to my research is larger than the mini 9 screen but I wonder, if you are having problems with the mini 9 just how much of a difference the 10” screen would make?

While my intentions for using the netbook all fall within the normal listed uses for a netbook (hence the reason I’m looking to buy one) I also want to be able to use it for the following:

• DM Tool at the table – with initiative and status tracking programs, PDF’s of Dungeon magazine and most of my books, I think it would come in real handy.
  
• Character creation – none of my players have a DDI account, so having an easy, portable Character Builder available with me when we create characters or add another player to our games should be extremely helpful.
  
• Writing adventure on the go – while waiting in the car while my wife is shopping to waiting on the layover flight, I want to be able to create monsters, encounters, and adventures wherever I am at.

None of the SSD’s in the netbooks I was looking at is as large as the suggested one here. From the research I’ve done it looks difficult to change out the SSD’s but that 80GB one looks sweet and I might have to find a way to change them out after purchasing one. I’ve already am set to change out the RAM after buying the netbook. Everything I’ve read said that changing the RAM is a must.

 

[ki11erDM]

I assume that it won’t be your only computer? If so then the smallish SSD is not a huge hindrance. A 10” netbook is the best size I think, small but not tooooo small. Try to wait till Oct 22 (the day W7 comes out) and then look around to see what is out, there should be lots of refreshed laptops/netbooks out.