About this time last year, my ex-gf talked me out of buying a mini-laptop, because they were so slow. IIRC, they only had Dells, at around 4-500 hundred dollars, or acers, at around 399.
Now, they also make HPs, and they are all around 3-400 bucks. Question: Are they all still slow, or have they managed to make them faster?
Thanks,
hh
What will you be using it for? I don’t have one, but my brother has one that’s about a year and a half old and I didn’t notice any sort of slowness with it.
Just standard junk…word processing, downloading movies and music from internet.
thanks,
hh
Unless you are a hobbit, Netbooks make pretty poor word processors. The keyboard is just too cramped. I know that people will be all of this, claiming that they can type just fine on their tiny keyboard, but IMHO, a small laptop (like a 13") is a much better machine. I have a Dell Mini-9, and it’s a neat little machine, but it’s little more than a toy for me.
Yeah, it’ll be more than fast enough for that.
my computer tech opinion… They are still slow. They are adequate for basic browsing and word processing but don’t expect much if you do anything that pulls any power at all. Most of them are 1ghz atom cpu’s. They are made to be cheap and power efficent, not fast. Even things like heavy flash game will tax them a bit. Many of them are also a nightmare to service making them not cost effective to repair.
Typically they use the Atom processor. Even with lots of RAM and a little SSD for storage, you really have a bottleneck there. Worse, MS is now pushing Windows 7 for the netbook, so you’ll have a hard time finding XP.
I guess you can probably get a newer dual core Atom netbook and put XP on it (assume drivers exist) and really have a machine comparable to a 2005 laptop. Or you can find a netbook that comes with a lightweight linux distribution and just use Firefox and OpenOffice and other open source alternatives.
Flash video is still a problem. 10.1 introduced hardware acceleration for video but it remains to be seen how well this works in the world of netbooks considering the ultra-cheap video chips they use.
Another alternative is to avoid netbooks altogether and just buy a 12" screen mini-laptop with a real processor and a real video card. Theyre only a couple hundred more if you find the right sale.
The OP mentioned that the netbooks cost $400-500 (although I thought that they were closer to $300). If you’re willing to spend $500, you can certainly get a full-fledged notebook system instead of a netbook.
I spent about 200GBP on each of three netbooks just before Christmas - two MSI Wind U100 and one Samsung NC10 - they’re all Atom 1.6ghz with 1gb RAM, 160gb HD and Windows XP.
My experience of them has been really positive - they’re noticeably faster than the ~5 year old Athlon XP 2000 desktop PC they replaced - and I have noticed no significant issues with performance in any way.
The kind of use I’m putting them to is generally web, mail, office documents and stuff, but I don’t have any problem editing multiple 12 megapixel digital photos.
I’m even editing video on my Samsung - I recently re-rendered a video project from a couple of years back - it’s only a fairly small one - a 4 minute video consisting of maybe 30 individual video files, a few dozen effects and transitions - within a dozen video layers in the project, maybe - it rendered to PAL resolution in about 7 minutes - the same project took an hour and a half to render to QVGA on the old desktop machine.
I don’t play games with high graphical demands - and I would expect these netbooks to perform poorly on that front, but apart from that, I’m not encountering any of the deficiencies that people keep saying they might have.
We got an 11.6" Acer a few weeks ago and couldn’t be happier with it. It comes with a Core 2 Duo processor in a package that weighs only 1.4kgs and to top it off has a full size keyboard.
To be fair, I’d call that Acer a small laptop, rather than a netbook - it’s a netbook form factor, but the internal spec is more like a full-spec laptop.
Yes it does have specs rivaling many notebooks, but price wise it still competes with most netbooks.
I have an Acer and just love it. Really all I use it for is surfing and emails and reading downloaded books. But it’s just so handy. Nice and light, and doesn’t take up much room.
Most Intel Atom CPU based units will work OK for all the usual stuff but streaming flash based video can stutter, and so can some higher definition videos even if they are stored on the hard disk. The onboard video chips on most netbooks are not powerhouses.
What’s the battery life with that Celeron onboard vs the Atom?
My kids get about 2 hours out of the three cell batteries on their Atom-based MSI netbooks - I get about 7 hours out of the 9 cell battery on my Samsung.
The spec for that Core 2 Acer states up to 6 hours on a 6 cell battery - but that sounds a bit optimistic to me.
Very optimistic.
Netbooks are great, but they have limitations. If you want small, cheap, and good battery life, and don’t want a lot of performance, they’re the best option. I’m typing this right now on a Samsung netbook, and I love it, but it does have limitations. It’s perfect for my work computer – I work in a research lab, and it’s great to have something portable so I can have a small computer that doesn’t clutter my lab bench up too much. It’s plenty powerful enough for my needs: internet access (without the flash games), email, light office use, and a handful of other specific apps. And the battery life is great; long enough that I can use it all day without the charger.
But there are downsides: the small keyboard is a pain for typing more than a few paragraphs, and it can be a bit pokey with flash-heavy websites or too much multitasking.
If you’re happy with something a bit bigger, there are full-featured smaller laptops in the 12"-14" range that are at the same price (though battery life won’t be quite as good).
If you can, I’d suggest getting a netbook with an ION graphics processor. By giving up a little battery life, you can get some additional performance for Flash and some games…
Yeah, it seems that generally, netbook specs tend to promise number of cells = number of hours. In reality, it tends to be max out at more like 75% of that, less with intensive use.