Buying a netbook (mini-laptop)? Advice needed.

Off-topic
21

Someone else said it too, use an external monitor at home/dorm (along with keyboard/mouse etc), and just take notes (or use the rollup keyboard, they’re great! :D)

I’d try to avoid Best Buy (that was where the guy kept cutting you off, right?) unless it’s your only option. If it is, and they try upselling you, cut them off and ask to speak to a manager. I’m kind of a d**k, so I’d prolly go back, wait for him to cut me off, and then tell him he lost the sale :wink: Cheap entertainment in these hard economic times :smiley:

And even though they’re “low power”, they can still handle picture & video editing if you need to. It’ll be slower, but if it’s only occasional use it’ll be fine (I started editing on 128M of RAM, and self-produced a 20min movie on 512M). You may want to buy a 2nd battery, or a bigger one if they offer it. I had 2 that I used with my 1st laptop, I’d swap them out when I needed too.

Let me know how it works out, I’m looking to replace my work desktop with one (lower power use & lower heat produced in the summer ;))

22

The Asus Eee PC 1008HA looks cool. It’s the latest version of the Asus netbook. Little bit spendy though for a netbook.

One thing to check is if the netbooks you look at can play HQ high definition YouTube videos. Some netbooks really struggle with higher resolution video playback due to the lack of a suitable video processor chip. The newer batch of netbooks may do better if you search around for the better speced ones. Definitely try before you buy so you know it will do your YouTube in HQ well enough.

23

Although I’m becoming more and more fond of OSX, I think I’d rather just buy a mac in the future. I don’t have the money for one right now, but I like the idea of having a PC netbook and a Mac.

The netbooks I’m looking at (Asus, HP, MSI, and Acer) all have the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 video card. From what I’ve been able to determine from online comparison charts, this is suitable to play World of Warcraft (not that I ever would!). I’d imagine youtube videos would be fine…not sure what my current laptop has, but it’s from '02 and plays youtube fine (except for long load times…).

Once I decide on a netbook and get a week or so to try it out, I’ll post a review of the netbook I got, and any relevant information that might be helpful to other potential netbook owners.

24

You still want to give it a try yourself to see how well it plays back Flash based HD or HQ video. The specs don’t tell you everything.

Flash isn’t (currently) very well optimized for video playback. It doesn’t take advantage of what the video chips are capable of in doing co-processing for video playback. That’s one of the problems with Flash. Microsoft’s Silverlight was getting good press because it actually has proper video processing acceleration and does video playback better than Flash. Silverlight does better HD video on a netbook than Flash does HD video on a netbook.

So try it out yourself at a store that will let you browse over to YouTube to play a HQ video. Or find a review of the netbook that explicitly tests YouTube video playback in HQ (or HD) mode.

Also find out if you’ll be eligible for an upgrade to Windows 7. There will be promotions where you are eligible for Windows 7 if you buy a computer now rather than waiting till Windows 7 is released. But I’m not sure how that is going to work with netbooks.

25

Yeah, will they be powerful enough to run it?

26

Yes. Microsoft has been doing optimizations on Windows 7 to make it run better on netbook style computers. Here’s one (brief) assessment of Windows 7 on a netbook. Google will find more.

Windows 7 Runs So Much Better Than Vista On a Netbook

27

Yeah, MS had to make sure Win7 would run on netbooks, otherwise they would have been forced to keep XP around for even longer, and/or concede the entire netbook genre to Linux :smiley: First time ever that the new version of Windows has lower hardware requirements then the previous version :wink:

The video processor doesn’t really matter on these, most of them use the same Intel video that my Macbook has, and it can play HD easily. It’s the 1.6ghz Atom processor that is the bottleneck.

With that screen size though, I’m not too worried about HD playback, I’ll settle for lower quality video (personally).

28

Well, Ive had my lil netbook for about two days now. It’s working out great!

I got the MSI Win U100. It has the Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz processor, 2 GB RAM, a b/g/n wireless card, GMA 950 video card, and 160 GB HD. To go with it, I have a roll-up silicone keyboard, usb mouse, usb hub, and usb CD/DVD drive (still waiting for it to come). It shipped with XP Home already installed. I’ve added Avast!, CCleaner, Ad-Aware, and SpyBot for virus/spyware prevention and removal. I paid $307 after a $26 discount through an eBay promotion.

Internet is blindingly fast in comparison with my old laptop, with a Pentium 4 and 512MB RAM. HQ video on youtube plays just fine…minor lags very occasionally, but I think that’s more a product of my crappy service provider. Although the video card can handle it, games like WoW or Tibia will not run smoothly - I believe due to the limitations of the processor. Not a problem, since I didn’t want to open that can of worms in the first place, anyway.

Battery life is great. It shipped with the larger 6-cell battery, which gives it about 4.5 hours of life, maybe less if you have the screen brightness all the way up or whatever.

Keyboard is very comfortable to type on, taking very little “getting used to.” My only gripe is that the " . " key is kind of squished and sometimes I hit the
" / " instead. Still, a much better ergonomically designed keyboard than most of the other netbooks I tried out.

Speakers put out a decent amount of sound, but are kind of “tinny.” What do you expect from a netbook? I use headphones a lot, anyway. I have computer speakers to use, if necessary.

This netbook is pretty much exactly what I wanted: super fast internet, big storage for my music library and personal photos, lite gaming (addicting games.com!), and the ability to run WMP, AIM,and FireFox simultaneously without getting slowed down. The biggest plus to me is the portability. This thing is about 10" x 7" and weighs in well under 3 lbs. With the long battery life, I can take it anywhere and get a lot of use out of it before the battery dies.

Very pleased. :smiley:

29

I know what I want for my birthday now! :wink: What resolution is the screen? Have you tried an external monitor with it?

30

With the recent announcement by Google of a new operating system for mobile devices, I wonder what that will mean for future netbooks? Or is it just for smaller/simpler devices like smartphones? I’m not sure.

31

The Google Chrome OS is based on Linux with some sort of new window management (will it be compatible with Gnome or KDE apps?). The idea being the web is the platform. I’m not sure how people are going to react to that. I don’t want a netbook where everything is tied to the web, all apps are web apps, and limited native application capabilities. The iPhone is having a go at that style of application style, but it’s not what I want for a mini PC style netbook.

32

agreed, if I were to invent another System I would go for a highly desynchronized apps thing: data may be at different places (home, roaming user, office, my own data vault) and will be resynchronized when needed… but data will be mine!
I designed something like that 15 years ago (synchronization was performed by mail!:p) and still think it’s a way to go : any business angel for that?

33

I have it set to 1024x600. No side scrolling at all. I had an external monitor set up because my old laptop’s screen gave out, but never hooked it up to the netbook. The netbook does have an eternal monitor plug, so I’m sure it wouldn’t be a probem.

I’m inclined to agree. From what I’ve read Google’s OS seems neat, but I don’t know about using it as my only OS. XP is tried and true…why try to fix what isn’t broken? I’ve little interest in having the latest and greatest for its own sake.

On a side not:

Got the external CD/DVD and it works great. Grabbed one on eBay for under $40 shipped. Reads real quick and only needs to be plugged into one USB port.