Netbooks?

I was never sold on the netbook fad. I tried one for three weeks and just couldn't get used to it. But, being in IT, I was also probably trying to do more with it than what was intended. As has been said, the small screen can take time to get used to and the lack of CD/DVD drive is annoying, especially when you want to load new software. I had to share the CD drive from another computer on my network and run the install files that way.

Especially with electronics, I wouldn't ever tell anyone to buy anything without trying it out first. Take a trip to Best Buy, CompUSA, or whatever your local b&m electronics store is and try typing on one for ten or fifteen minutes to see if you could get comfortable with it.

If you do decide to go with one, I think minimum requirements are: 60GB hard drive, 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor (pretty much standard on all of them), and 1 GB memory. But, like I said, I was only on it for three weeks, so there may be some varying opinion about what the bare minimum is.

HP and Asus have the highest reviews. Apple iPad doesn't currently support flash player, which can be a big part of some website's design. And as you would use this primarily for browsing, there no point in getting something that will fall short that way.

Good luck!

[hotreds]

I have an Netbook that I'm not happy with at all. It is very, very, slow, even after I added 1 Gig of RAM(Now has 2 GIGs RAM) It has an Atom Processor- that is supposedly the problem. I only use this for surfing the net and emails when traveling, so I can't really justify getting something better. I LOVE the size, however. If they ever make a fast netbook, I might be really tempted.

And all this after I tweaked it for the fastest possible performance. Still slower than molasses in wintertime!

[VirtualSmitty]

Originally Posted by hotreds

I have an Netbook that I'm not happy with at all. It is very, very, slow, even after I added 1 Gig of RAM(Now has 2 GIGs RAM) It has an Atom Processor- that is supposedly the problem. I only use this for surfing the net and emails when traveling, so I can't really justify getting something better. I LOVE the size, however. If they ever make a fast netbook, I might be really tempted.

And all this after I tweaked it for the fastest possible performance. Still slower than molasses in wintertime!

Prob your OS slowing it down. I've seen plenty of atom netbooks fly when tweaked properly. I installed jolicloud on a friends asus 1005 and it gets a 13 second boot. Even my old asus 700 running the celeron processor gets a 26 second boot with ubuntu.

If you can wait until this summer I would.

Netbooks are already dead, believe it or not, smartbooks are coming now. Same price, more power.

[hotreds]

Originally Posted by VirtualSmitty

Prob your OS slowing it down. I've seen plenty of atom netbooks fly when tweaked properly. I installed jolicloud on a friends asus 1005 and it gets a 13 second boot. Even my old asus 700 running the celeron processor gets a 26 second boot with ubuntu.

Not so much the boot- it's the file swapping- that hard drive light goes on and stays on for a considerable length of time when I'm going from one email to another, opening a new web page, etc. etc. It uses Windows XP- it's an Asus EEE PC. It was worse with 1 GB RAM, but 2 has not helped that much- and one would think that 2 Gig RAM would really be enough to have a fast machine and not need the hard drive file swap so much!