• Sound Quality
• Fan Noise
• Screen Blotching

so I thought why not put together a little survey and try to quantify how prevalent these problems are. I also took the opportunity to get a little bit on the background of the type of people who were adopting Sammys and the answers to some other questions, such as how many different makes of Hard Drives are installed.

So was born The Sammy Survey.........

Click Here to take the survey

48 hours in and over 130 had completed the survey and a general picture has emerged of us as Netbook virgins who already own at least 2 and in many cases 3+ computers.

We're also not afraid to fiddle, several are already multibooting or using alternative Operating Systems, whilst half of us have already upgraded the RAM to 2Gb with the majority of the remainder planning on doing so. From personal experience I suspect this is more down to price (seen as low as £12 for a stick of 2Gb DDR2 on Play recently) than to an actual need for it. Mind you Mr Samsung it would be nice if you filled that single slot with a 2Gb stick as standard :-)

Black or White are the most popular colours but this may simply be down to a lack of Blues that have been released into the wild.

Fujitsu account for just over 50% of the hard drives out there with Hitachi and Toshba making up the bulk of the remainder although a small number of Western Digitals have now also been spotted(15 Jan 09: The Western Digitals have now also been joined by Samsung HDDs). What would be interesting would be to try and bring all 4 varieties together and benchmark them to see if there is any discernible performance difference however given the randomness of their appearance that may prove problematic.

Ok let's take a look at the 3 main niggles that prompted this survey

• Sound Quality
  
  Ok they're never going to be the best speakers in the world but just over half of owners consider them 'adequate' with a quarter reporting the sound quality as poor. Maybe there's scope somewhere for a keen modder to try upgrading them?

• Fan Noise
  
  Personally the only time I've heard the fan is either in an extremely quiet room or by holding the fan exhaust to my ear but there were suspicions that some Sammys may be noisier than others. The resulst from The Sammy Survey generally agreed with 95% of owners reporting their Sammy as either Silent or Quiet.

• Screen Blotching
  
  Samsung have admitted there is a problem with this (see this thread) and will repair any that are affected. My recommendation if your Sammy is suffering from Screen psoriasis and you bought it in store (which a quarter of us have) would be to make a bootable USB linux distro, return it to the store and ask them to replace it. Before you leave the store ask them to take it out of the box, boot it from the USB drive (that way you're not going to launch the Windows licensing agreement) and check that the screen is blotch free.
  
  So whats the scale of the problem ? Well based on the results of the survey it would appear to have affected (or been a problem) for around 14% of owners. This figure has been slowly creeping upwards. (15 Jan 09: Judging by the latest responses Samsung appear to have resolved this problem as the figure is now 10% and falling)
  
  Higher than would be ideal but certainly not high enough to give you sleepless nights, yet!

So there we have it. Once I get a bit more time I'll try and do a more detailed breakdown based around colour,flap (manufacture) date etc but in the meantime here are the results

Mike aka Panman

20 Dec 08