Tell me about netbooks

[Declan]

If your using one or about to make the plunge, what are you aiming at in terms of hardware manufacturer, screen size and does the OS make a difference to you.

Im looking at a basic Windows OS, minimum one usb port that I can tether the iPhone to.

Declan

[Nava]

I have one, a Toshiba NB100. The closest I find in their US page is the NB200 (http://laptops.toshiba.com/laptops/mini-notebook/NB200).

Windows, 3 USB ports, SD card reader (in theory it can read PSP cards too, but don't try that). It's powerful enough for work, which is what I want it for. It's a brand with a decent reputation and it was tons cheaper than the next one (which, incidentally, was a Dell and I only touch those when they've been provided by my employer). They had several variants in the store at similar prices, I took the one with the highest RAM and lowest HD as I value speed over storage.

[leander]

I recently got a Samsung NC10. One of our partners, Optus, was offering it on a monthly plan that included 5gb of data (built in SIM card).

I personally wouldn't recommend it as a replacement for your regular laptop/desktop, but as something to carry around when you're on the go, it's great. I added some RAM - from 1gb to 2gb - and that made a big difference.

Overall it's fine for word/excel/outlook and basic web surfing. Graphics will kill it. Most have plenty of USB slots as there is no internal CD drive.

Pros: Great battery life, very light, very mobile, keyboard 93% (takes a bit of getting used to), quick bootup, cheap, built in 3g SIM.

Cons: slower than normal computer, slow and limited graphics, small screen.

Overall a big thumbs up as a second portable!

[NineToTheSky]

I agree with leander. I, too, have a NC10 and have upgraded it to 2mb - but to be honest, I'm not sure how much of a difference that has made. I got the Samsung because it got very good reviews, and a retailer was doing a very good discount on it.

It is purely a second, easy to carry computer for me. I wouldn't have it as my only one. In the household, we have 20" and 15.6" laptops, and the 10" laptop. My ideal would be a 10" netbook with a screen that unfolded to 15". :cool:

The size of the screen is a little bit restricting when it comes to viewing photos, and for some web pages. I'll second the battery life: I can get over 8 hours from it. I find the touchpad a little too small.

I did consider getting a Linux version, but I've heard that there are compatibility issues. For the small saving, I didn't want any hassles, so I went for one with Windows.

[Unintentionally Blank]

I have a first-gen Aspire with the 8 Gb SSD. The SSD is the single biggest flaw to this unit.

I've played around with it and like what it can do. Were you to plug it into a monitor, keyboard and mouse, it's a perfectly serviceable word chunking computer. It is _not_ a only-use machine, it's an adjunct. I purchased a 9 cell battery for it and it gets a honest 9 hours out of it. Really. 9 hours of constant audio, web streaming, 2.5 lb portability.

But currently, it's acting as a linux server in the home, I just don't carry it around after getting my office Mac Book upgraded.

[Caffeine.addict]

I have an HP Mini (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9377097&type=product&id=1218094853466) netbook. It isn't bad, it runs Firefox and I can use it for basic surfing. The size is an issue and I think it would prevent you from using it as a primary computer. The battery life on it is only good The Asus's have a better battery life but I had one and it had charging issues so I returned it. It has three USB ports and a VGA output. Mine has a 160gb hard drive so there are no issues with storage.

I use it exclusively for surfing the internet and Skype. I wouldn't want to use it for anything heavier as it is a bit slower than a regular desktop would be.

[LurkMeister]

I have an Asus Eee; 160G hard drive and (IIRC) 1G RAM, running Windows XP, I got one with what is supposed to be a 6-hour battery although it seems to be more like 5.5 hours, which is still more than adequate for my needs. Occasionally I think that I should have paid a bit extra and gotten one with a ten-inch screen. I use it when I'm traveling and attending meetings of my writers group because it's easier to carry than my laptop. It has three USB ports so if I really needed to I could plug in a DVD drive, but haven't gotten around to getting one yet.

My only complaint is that the right-hand shift key is in a strange place, and I keep hitting the Enter key instead.

[KidScruffy]

Overall it's fine for word/excel/outlook and basic web surfing. Graphics will kill it. Most have plenty of USB slots as there is no internal CD drive.

Does anyone have any experience viewing .pdfs on a netbook? I've been thinking about getting one, but the sole purpose would be viewing .pdfs for work and I don't know if that would be asking too much of a netbook...

[Unintentionally Blank]

The happiest I was with the netbook was finding that F11 in IE and Netscape make ALL gui stuff go away, leaving just the web page I was interested in. 1024x? is wide enough for a page, but you'll be doing a lot of vertical scrolling.

[Any Other Name]

Does anyone have any experience viewing .pdfs on a netbook? I've been thinking about getting one, but the sole purpose would be viewing .pdfs for work and I don't know if that would be asking too much of a netbook...

Acer Aspire with 80GB HD 1GB RAM running Windows XP. Use it on trips for Word and Excel. Can read pdf's fine, can write pdfs using PDFWriter shareware. It's my road machine - my 17" laptop is 3-4x the size.

[KidScruffy]

Acer Aspire with 80GB HD 1GB RAM running Windows XP. Use it on trips for Word and Excel. Can read pdf's fine, can write pdfs using PDFWriter shareware. It's my road machine - my 17" laptop is 3-4x the size.

Cool, thanks.

[Otanx]

Got the Aspire with the 8GB drive here as well. It is nice for basic computing tasks. We got it to replace my wifes laptop I fried by leaving running on a hotel bed. Comforter covered the vents, and I came back to a blue screen. Never ran right again.

Pros - Very light. Easy to slip in a backpack for your carry on when traveling. Battery lasts forever. Even longer if you turn off wi-fi etc when not using it. The 8GB SSD boots fast.

Cons - After installing office, Acrobat reader, and all the windows updates the internal drive is pretty much full. Next XP service pack will be fun if it is very large. Not enough USB ports, but that is solved by a USB hub.

One thing that we did was install PowerISO that will mount ISO images as drives. We then "burn" our CDs to ISOs and save them to USB drives. That way we don't have to carry a external CD drive.

The company we work for at corprate uses netbooks as workstations. Redirect profiles to a server, connect a monitor, USB keyboard, mouse, and you got cheap desktops that run at a decent speed that take up almost no room. Bonus that people can take them home by unplugging only a few connections.

-Otanx

[Unintentionally Blank]

In the basement, I have the Aspire (linux hacking) and two Pentium 4's for file services and bittorrent (that last is on an isolated part of the network). I also have a computer about 100 miles away that serves as my families' web server. I plan on replacing ALL of them with netbooks eventually. They're quiet, have nearly no moving parts, draw next to no power, and heck, they've got a 2 hour UPS built in!

And they're TINY. Picture the space four desktop machines take up vs four netbooks. Plus they've got built in screens and keyboards, no need for a KVM.

Most of my needs are light enough that an Atom based netbook should have NO problem with them.

[Caffeine.addict]

Does anyone have any experience viewing .pdfs on a netbook? I've been thinking about getting one, but the sole purpose would be viewing .pdfs for work and I don't know if that would be asking too much of a netbook...

Mine has Adobe Reader on it. It isn't the fastest thing in the world but it works. Mine is windows so I was able to log in to my work computer and it worked pretty well.

[The Vorlon]

[QUOTE=NineToTheSky;11637330]I agree with leander. I, too, have a NC10 and have upgraded it to 2mb - but to be honest, I'm not sure how much of a difference that has made. QUOTE]


You do realize that the nutered Atom chip ignores anything over 1Gb?










Thanks Intel!

[astro]

I have 2 Lenovo s-10 netnooks. 10.2 screen is about he smallest you should get. I threw a 500 gig disk in mine to use it as a media machine. They work great for web browsing and office suite stuff and the 6 cell battery option gives a solid 5-6 hours uptime. Movies are OK but pushing it by playing streaming flash AV or HD movies will cause the machine to stutter occasionally.

You need to realize the N270 Atom CPU in most notebooks is about equivalent to a 2-3 year old Celeron CPU in horsepower and netbook onboard video tends to be on the slow side so moderate your expectations. Gaming is not a good option for most netbooks.

IMO Lenovo/Thinkpad has the best build quality of the netbook manufs. If I was doing it over again i might go a bit larger and more powerful. Lenovo has a new 12inch "netbook" unit with more horsepower for $ 379 (http://www.resellerratings.com/forum/rr-homepage-deals/145577-lenovo-ideapad-s12-12-1-notebook-379-shipped.html) on sale that might be a more versatile unit than the 10" units.

[astro]

[QUOTE=NineToTheSky;11637330]I agree with leander. I, too, have a NC10 and have upgraded it to 2mb - but to be honest, I'm not sure how much of a difference that has made. QUOTE]


You do realize that the nutered Atom chip ignores anything over 1Gb?

Thanks Intel!

My Lenovo MB BIOS with ATOM 270 CPU sees 2 gigs RAM onboard. Is this a MB or CPU issue?

[Silophant]

Does anyone have any experience viewing .pdfs on a netbook? I've been thinking about getting one, but the sole purpose would be viewing .pdfs for work and I don't know if that would be asking too much of a netbook...

My MSI Wind, with 1 gb of ram, can view .pdfs adequately. Takes a little while to get loaded up, but then it works fine. I'm also running windows 7, which is a little harder on it than xp, so you might do better with xp.

[NineToTheSky]

[QUOTE=The Vorlon;11640224]

My Lenovo MB BIOS with ATOM 270 CPU sees 2 gigs RAM onboard. Is this a MB or CPU issue?

Yes, my Samsung sees 2gb too. My comment about it not seeming to make much difference would seem to support what you say, but leander's would seem to contradict it. I've read elsewhere of many people upgrading to 2gb. Are you absolutely sure?

[leander]

I've noticed a serious difference after the upgrade, so I'm curious about the claims that the chip doesn't recognize it. The major difference is that awful "lag" when you click on a webpage or change to another app. It's significantly reduced with the 2gb upgrade.

[ReuvenB]

Asus eee901a, upgraded to 2gb RAM. It has the 4gb SSD, and I love it. I could throw the damn thing off a cliff and it would be still be humming happily away. I'm running OpenSUSE on it, so no Windows shenanigans, and a smaller footprint, too. The best part is being able to VNC into my desktop from on the road.

[Unintentionally Blank]

The RAM Limitations were imposed by Microsoft and are imposed by the chipset, not the CPU. (My aspire maxes out at 1.5 Gb) The Atom is a 32-bit processor (rather than 64), has little or no L2 cache, and was a conscious applications of 'What do we get if we throw away things we don't strictly need' vs 'we have to make this X% faster than the predecessor and give it new whizbang features.

What you get is a processor that consumes 12 watts instead of 85, and costs $25 in quantity instead of $400. Rather than cramming more components on a single CPU to make it faster, they crammed more CPUs on each wafer to get the costs down.

In the meantime, Microsoft didn't want the cheap processor running XP to cannibalize sales of Vista, so they kneecapped it to 1 Gb, but some (most) manufacturers made the machines upgradable to 2 gb.

Why 2Gb? Because the old, well known, cheap, chipset was designed when 2 Gb was considered a crazy amount of memory.

So, part of the limitation is hardware, and part is politics. The end result is one cheap, slow-but-efficient piece of kit.

[enipla]

Love, love my Acer Aspire one. I'm posting from it now. Don't have a laptop, and rarely use the desk top any more. I would recommend getting at least 2 USB ports. The Acer h
You may want to use a cordless mouse and also your PDA for a modem. And have a port for a memory stick or blue tooth or something. I have never used more than two at at time myself.

Great little machine. Light weight nice keyboard. Oh it has a sim card reader too. Great for quick downloads from your camera. Used it yesterday when a bunch of us got together for a quick get together at the hotel before we parted ways. I could quickly share pictures of the night before, and the machine is nice and small so it did not get in the way.

One of the best buys I've made in a long time.

Did I say I Love it?

[mhendo]

I've always had a desktop computer, but i recently got myself an Asus Eee1005HA-P (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/631135-REG/ASUS_1005HA_PU1X_BK_Eee_PC_1005HA_PU1X_Seashell.html) for portable computing, and i love it.

I got the model with the largest (63Whr) battery capacity, and the battery life is incredible. If i'm doing basic stuff (internet, email, word processing, spreadsheets), i get 8 hours easily on one charge, and usually closer to 10. Obviously high-drain stuff like video reduces that considerably, but even when i watch a movie on Netflix i've never had less than about 6 hours on a charge.

I was also really impressed with the keyboard. A friend of mine had one of the first-generation Eee models, and typing was a joke. The newer, 10" models have a really spacious keyboard for such a small computer, and even a ham-fisted typist like me manages fine with it.

The model i bought has the slightly more powerful chip (N280 1.66Ghz, instead of N270 1.6Ghz). To be honest, i'm not sure whether that makes a whole lot of difference; the benchmarks for the two processors aren't very different at all. As others have said, power and performance is not good enough for this to be your only computer, unless all you do is email, internet, and word processing. Still, i frequently have Thunderbird, Firefox, Word, and Excel open together without any problem at all. You do have to be a bit more frugal in your web browsing; if you're the sort of person who likes to leave about 20 Firefox tabs open, you'll probably want to change that habit otherwise a netbook will just grind to a halt.

I wouldn't run HD video on it, but i've watched NetFlix movies and MLB.com streaming video without any real problems. It's obviously better if you're not running anything else at the same time, but with the small screen that would be pointless anyway.

Overall, i think it's excellent. Light, easy to carry around, great battery life, and powerful enough for a second computer. No regrets about the purchase.

[astro]

The RAM Limitations were imposed by Microsoft and are imposed by the chipset, not the CPU. (My aspire maxes out at 1.5 Gb) The Atom is a 32-bit processor (rather than 64), has little or no L2 cache, and was a conscious applications of 'What do we get if we throw away things we don't strictly need' vs 'we have to make this X% faster than the predecessor and give it new whizbang features.

What you get is a processor that consumes 12 watts instead of 85, and costs $25 in quantity instead of $400. Rather than cramming more components on a single CPU to make it faster, they crammed more CPUs on each wafer to get the costs down.

In the meantime, Microsoft didn't want the cheap processor running XP to cannibalize sales of Vista, so they kneecapped it to 1 Gb, but some (most) manufacturers made the machines upgradable to 2 gb.

Why 2Gb? Because the old, well known, cheap, chipset was designed when 2 Gb was considered a crazy amount of memory.

So, part of the limitation is hardware, and part is politics. The end result is one cheap, slow-but-efficient piece of kit.

Windows XP "sees" and reports the 2 gigs of memory in the XP hardware readout in XP so does the belarc hardware reporter (www.belarc.com) . This claim doesn't make sense (to me) based on what I'm seeing.

[mhendo]

Windows XP "sees" and reports the 2 gigs of memory in the XP hardware readout in XP so does the belarc hardware reporter (www.belarc.com) . This claim doesn't make sense (to me) based on what I'm seeing.Not only that, but just about every review i've read of Atom-equipped netbooks reports better performance after installing more memory.

I guess it's possible that all those reports are simply wishful thinking, but it seems unlikely.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Windows XP "sees" and reports the 2 gigs of memory in the XP hardware readout in XP so does the belarc hardware reporter (www.belarc.com) . This claim doesn't make sense (to me) based on what I'm seeing.

cite: http://www.techspot.com/news/31996-microsoft-retains-1gb-ram-limit-on-netbooks.html

ETA: Clarification: There's a good two dozen netbooks out there. EVERYONE is making them. There were limits placed on them by Microsoft but vendors have been working around them (by putting linux on the netbook, ferinstance)...

Now, find an atom based netbook with MORE than 2 Gb of RAM.

[mhendo]

cite: http://www.techspot.com/news/31996-microsoft-retains-1gb-ram-limit-on-netbooks.html

ETA: Clarification: There's a good two dozen netbooks out there. EVERYONE is making them. There were limits placed on them by Microsoft but vendors have been working around them (by putting linux on the netbook, ferinstance)...

Now, find an atom based netbook with MORE than 2 Gb of RAM.Well, i don't think anyone ever said that there were netbooks with more than 2Gb.

Also, while your story says that 1Gb is the amount of RAM that "the 'netbook' edition of Windows will tolerate," it seems that the hardware limitations that MS places on netbooks are, for the most part, contractual limitations on the manufacturers, rather than technological limits on the computers themselves. And plenty of people seem to be having success in replacing the 1Gb RAM module with a 2Gb stick, both in terms of Windows XP recognizing the RAM, and in terms of computer performance. As this article (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/netting-more-memory-for-netbooks/) says:Although it may void the warranty, many new netbook owners are taking memory matters into their own hands by simply ordering extra chips from RAM vendors and personally installing them. Some netbooks can actually take 1.5 or 2 gigabytes of memory, so check the technical specifications of your netbook to see how much memory it can accept.The distinction, in many cases, seems to be that, while Asus or Dell or whoever can't sell you a netbook with 2Gb of RAM, they can sell you a netbook with an accessible RAM compartment, where you can do your own swap.

I've read of some cases where people need to mess around with the BIOS to get the larger RAM stick to work, but they can usually manage to get it working.

[Unintentionally Blank]

I'm not sure what the disconnect is. I've stated some limitations were due to hardware (true. You cannot expand past 2 Gb) and some were political (true: Microsoft didn't wish to cannibalize sales of Vista)

You're agreeing with me, or I'm misunderstanding you.

[astro]

I'm not sure what the disconnect is. I've stated some limitations were due to hardware (true. You cannot expand past 2 Gb) and some were political (true: Microsoft didn't wish to cannibalize sales of Vista)

You're agreeing with me, or I'm misunderstanding you.

I think several of us read your statement re MS "kneecapping" the Atom 270 to mean that MS had somehow modified the netbook XP OS so that a 270 CPU could only access 1 gig of RAM regardless of system RAM.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Ah. Well, I'm not Unintentionally Blank for nothin'.

The funny thing is, Windows 7 is supposed to run decently on 'em....Vista won't.

Course, when I tried running the Release Candidate, it did in fact work, and work well, then the next day fell over as there was only half a gig of storage after the install. That's my biggest gripe about the Aspire One...the 8 Gb SSD.