Show off your netbooks!

[Nimrod]

Hey,

Everyone seems to be buying these little netbooks now, with prices starting around £160 ($300) which are so small, light and mobile. I thought it was time people with them showed off, there's so many to choose from each with there own pro's and con's. Some come with hard drives, some come with solid state (flash) disks some have Vista some have XP there's so many different types Also after using one for a few months, I got out my old laptop and turned it on, it was so heavy and seemed massive after getting use to my netbook.

I choose the Dell Mini 9 because its one of the smallest netbooks available and has a solid state disk. It also came with XP Home but I reformatted it with XP Pro as soon as I got it.

Pros:

One of the lightest and smallest available
Sleek design
Solid State Disk
As much as its hard to believe, Dell do update there drivers more often than most laptop makers.

Cons:

Keyboard takes a long time to get use to, squeezing all the keys on lead to weird placements of some keys.
Has the shiny coating like an iPod meaning finger prints all over here.


For those of you with Netbooks to show them off and your reasons for choosing it

 

[InsaneNutter]

After spending a few weeks researching the different netbooks available I decided on the MSI Wind.
Realising most of the netbooks on sale at the moment have similar hardware specifications the size of the screen, keyboard and battery life became a much bigger influence on choosing which netbook to buy.

The specs of the MSI wind vary depending on which model you purchase, my wind has an Intel Atom Processor running at 1.6ghz 1gb of ram (Upgraded to 2gigs) 160gb hard drive and came with Windows XP Home pre installed (Formatted with XP Pro).
Other features include Wireless N networking, 100mbit Ethernet, Bluetooth, 1.3mp Webcam, SDHC compatible card reader and a built in microphone.

I ended up choosing the wind because:

• I found the keyboard on the Wind very nice to type on, it’s almost the same as normal keyboard and didn’t take me any time to get used to.
  
• The wind had a 10” screen where as most other netbooks have an 8.9” screen, the extra 1” does make a nice difference to me.
  
• The battery in the wind will last for around 6 hours, this is perfect for me, it will last a whole day at University then still have around 2 hours battery life once I get home. No need to worry about carrying the charger around with you.

Other thoughts:

As far as netbooks go I would say the wind is perfect, at least to me. After using it for around 6weeks I don’t have any complaints, if I was been fussy I could say the sound quality isn’t the best but ive never expected speakers onboard laptops to be any good. My wind is muted 95% of the time anyway!

If running other OS’s apart from Windows takes your fancy, Mac OSX will run almost perfectly on the Wind, there’s no drivers for the wireless network card but apart from that it works flawlessly. I’ve not installed Linux on it yet but I’ve read that most distributions should also work perfectly.

The Wind compared to the Acer Ferrari, a 15.4” Laptop.

The Wind, running OSX 10.5

 

[MunkyMagikUK]

How much did you pick that up for InsaneNutter?

I'm getting a smaller (13") laptop for my birthday to take away to Uni, but depending on how much these things are I might get one of these as well to take to lectures etc.

But, would you say that these are good enough to replace a normal laptop? Or would you still have a bigger laptop for movies etc.? And also do netbooks have VGA ports to output the image to TV's?

 

[InsaneNutter]

You can get the MSI Wind with the 3 cell battery for about £280 or one with a bigger hard drive and 6 cell battery for about £320-30ish.

The 3 cell battery will do about 3hours where as the 6 cell one will do around 6, if you don’t fancy carrying a charger around with you it’s worth getting the bigger battery and a bit of extra hard drive thrown in.

It has a VGA port so you can hook it up to a monitor/tv no problem.

I personally wouldn’t go buying 2 laptops, although netbooks are not the highest of spec for just general Microsoft Office, Internet and MSN use they should be perfect. If you were to get one I would be tempted to get usb mouse/keyboard and a monitor to hook it up to when you want to use it in your accommodation at uni, when your not out and about you will want a bigger screen to use.

Or you could keep your current laptop and get a netbook for lectures.

 

[MunkyMagikUK]

You can get the MSI Wind with the 3 cell battery for about £280 or one with a bigger hard drive and 6 cell battery for about £320-30ish.

The 3 cell battery will do about 3hours where as the 6 cell one will do around 6, if you don’t fancy carrying a charger around with you it’s worth getting the bigger battery and a bit of extra hard drive thrown in.

It has a VGA port so you can hook it up to a monitor/tv no problem.

I personally wouldn’t go buying 2 laptops, although netbooks are not the highest of spec for just general Microsoft Office, Internet and MSN use they should be perfect. If you were to get one I would be tempted to get usb mouse/keyboard and a monitor to hook it up to when you want to use it in your accommodation at uni, when your not out and about you will want a bigger screen to use.

Or you could keep your current laptop and get a netbook for lectures.

Cheers Matt, I think I'll stick with getting the 13" one, as I think I'll prefer the bigger screen, bigger hard drive and i don't think it'll be too much trouble carrying it around, but notebooks ceertainly do look tempting.

 

[Safinn]

Yes they look very good. I'll have a look at getting one when I get into Uni. Don't think I would have much use of one now.

 

[Backchat]

That's a smart little book that Nutter, do you still use it or have you got a new one now days ?

I use em for light stuff like forums, chat rooms, you tube, sound cloud etc so my pc doesn't get clogged and because there so easy to lounge about with,..

I've had others but went for a Toshiba NB 520 last few months which I quite happy with tbh .... I know a lot of people don't like Toshiba but personally I like there soft-ware solutions which was a big factor in why I went for it and has got a few good features.... the keyboard and pad are excellent, 10.1 inch screen, 2 gig ram and dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor.... it's also got bluetooth 3 which is harder to find where I am and one of the usb ports allows you to use it as a power source even when it is off which I like.

Another feature I like are the Harman Kardon speakers that are installed (which Toshiba has put on other lap tops) but easily makes this net book louder than a lot of larger lap tops around and can listen to music or watch movies with fairly decent sound

What I don't like about it is the screen resolution (1024), it only came with 7 basic so had to up-grade and that it hasn't got a HDMI port for some strange reason which is a massive shame.

All round though it's the best and most well built Net-book I've had so far and the first one I've actually grown to respect and taken care of instead of using it as a disposable comp like I did my other books

Wouldn't mind trying an SSD (or lap top) though and will probably look at one of those next????

(not my pics, from web but I have the brown/black one)

 

[InsaneNutter]

Wow this is an old thread, however I do remember the Netbook craze well!

That looks a pretty decent Netbook you have there too, the spec of them has improved a lot since i got mine.

As it happens I did still use my Netbook until very recently, meaning it was my main portable computer for 4 years. The Netbook served me very well in that time and the battery still holds its charge for a couple of hours.

My only real complaint is that Netbooks are just a little too small, and the 1024x600 screen is limiting. However it was perfect for my needs at the time, plus Netbooks were the smallest / lightest computers you could get back in 2008.

I mainly used mine for taking notes in lectures, viewing Power point slides, editing essays in Word and internet browsing, all of which it did great. We found Netbooks made great computers for playing classic PC games too and had some fun LAN's with them over the years.

Recently I decided an Ultrabook was an ideal replacement for my Netbook, after a lot of research I ended up getting a 13" Macbook Air in October last year (The £300 discount I could get on one helped with that, and made it cheaper than a Windows Ultrabook of equal spec). The Air / Ultrabooks in general are a great improvement on Netbooks I think. There much thinner, more powerful, have better graphics capability and longer better life (I guess that depends on what you purchase). The only real downside is the cost of them compared to Netbooks!

Size wise although the 13" Macbook Air is larger than my 10" Netbook, both weigh around the same at a rough guess. Despite been larger the Air is so much thinner, so I don't even know its in my bag, just like the Netbook.

I think Ultrabooks are a great balance between a Netbook and full laptop, you get the power of a proper laptop and retain the portability of a Netbook.

Some comparison photos between my MSI Wind and the Macbook Air 13":

 

[Backchat]

Lmao....there isn't much comparison between those umm comparisons is there