Tell me about netbooks

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

I have one, a Toshiba NB100. The closest I find in their US page is the 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.

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!

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.

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.

I have an HP Mini 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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

[quote=“NineToTheSky, post:4, topic:512914”]

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!

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 on sale that might be a more versatile unit than the 10" units.

[quote=“The_Vorlon, post:15, topic:512914”]

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

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.

[quote=“astro, post:17, topic:512914”]

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?

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.