Netbook owners: opinions please

[HardwareGeek]

Hey guys,

Short story is i will have to move away from home for awhile for work and can't really imagine living without a computer lol

So i started to look at netbooks as they are relatively cheap and i dont like portable computers in general so i dont want to spend too much as it will probably never be used once i am reunited with my rig.

Looking at netbooks they appear to be in the range of 180-350, approx 250 for a decent one, i was looking at an amd based one for more power and better gfx.

imo once you are in the 250 price range it doesn't seem cheap enough to live with the small screen, lack of power, lack of ports and other limits.

My requirements are in order:

1) Reasonably usable - doesn't need to game or anything tho
2) cheap

I dont care about battery life or size/weight at all

ps. prob wont get any use once im back home, but maybe i could use it for something (any ideas?) once back or maybe sell it

So what do you guys who own a netbook think, would you buy one again or get a cheap 13" or 15" laptop?

Thanks

 

[e36Adz]

I personally find a netbook too small to use day to day. I prefer a screen around 12-13" and if you can stretch to around the £350 mark, you can get the following:

Acer TravelMate 8371

Intel® ULV Core 2 Duo (ULV SU9400, 3 MB L2 cache, 1.4GHz, 800MHz FSB)
13.3" (Acer CineCrystal, 1366x768 HD, High Brightness, LED Backlit)
Win Vista (make sure you stick Win 7 on!)
4GB (DDR3 1066MHZ)
320GB
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 with 512MB Dedicated RAM
5-in-1 card reader (SD//MS/MS-Pro/MMC/xD-Picture card™)
3x USB 2.0 ports
Webcam
Bluetooth
Fingerprint Reader
Kensington lock slot
8 Hrs+ Battery Life
~1.7Kg

It's a lot of laptop for the money.

 

[olivier renault]

Cheap CULV laptop against notebooks any day.

 

[BlackCoat2k10]

I personally find a netbook too small to use day to day. I prefer a screen around 12-13" and if you can stretch to around the £350 mark, you can get the following:

Acer TravelMate 8371

Intel® ULV Core 2 Duo (ULV SU9400, 3 MB L2 cache, 1.4GHz, 800MHz FSB)
13.3" (Acer CineCrystal, 1366x768 HD, High Brightness, LED Backlit)
Win Vista (make sure you stick Win 7 on!)
4GB (DDR3 1066MHZ)
320GB
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 with 512MB Dedicated RAM
5-in-1 card reader (SD//MS/MS-Pro/MMC/xD-Picture card™)
3x USB 2.0 ports
Webcam
Bluetooth
Fingerprint Reader
Kensington lock slot
8 Hrs+ Battery Life
~1.7Kg

It's a lot of laptop for the money.

This! Use your brain and see netbooks are very limiting, while the above spec (which can be had for around £360 delivered maybe less) is absoloutely awesome! It can play games, albeit on low settings but still plays and it can also do a lot of cpu intensive stuff over most Netbooks and their puny atom Cpu's.


Edit = I came from a Samsung Nc10, and although it was nice small compact and had its moments, compared to the specc'd notebook above it gets left in the gutters!!!!

 

[K1ng_ERR0R]

iv got a asus 1201n 12.1", good for gaming on the go, and it only cost me £400, upgraded it a lot new hhd 500gb 7200rpm and 4gb of hyperx kingston ddr2 ram, win7 64bit, etc...

but standard package, its pretty powerful it has a dual core atom with hyperthreading...

it runs like a sweetie...although u only get about 5 hours normal use and about 3-3.5 hours while gaming...still pretty gd wee find i think

very light and very stylish...kind looks like a mac but without the 4 digit price.

 

[HardwareGeek]

Thanks for the replys

i've found a 15" i am considering, not worried about size/weight etc.

Just need to figure out if i really wanna spend the cash now seeing i dont like laptops

This was the 15" i found incase it helps anyone else

Acer Aspire Timeline 5810TG £380

Intel® ULV Core 2 Duo (ULV SU9400, 3 MB L2 cache, 1.4GHz, 800MHz FSB)
15.6" (Acer CineCrystal, 1366x768 HD, High Brightness, LED Backlit)
Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
(4096MB 4GB)
500GB
DVD Rewriter (Records DVDs 8x & CDs 24x & Dual Layer Super Multi)
Dedicated (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 with 512MB Dedicated RAM)


Thanks again guys

 

[olivier renault]

Pretty much like the 8371, with added optical drive. Acer has great offerings in the mobile notebook range.

 

[daz]

A year or two ago when you could get a useable netbook for £150 it was a very useful device. The price of netbooks seems to have gone up and some of the more portable laptops have come down, it's kind of made them a little obsolete.

 

[Blue160]

I bought an Acer aspire one D250 netbook for work (teaching kids to play the trumpet!).

It cost about £200 with Win 7 starter.

I was worried it wouldn't be powerful enough, but it's plenty good enough for what I need. I upgraded the RAM to 2Gb and it's happy with itunes, Sibelius 5, several office documents, and a couple of PDFs open all at once. (Can also play Doom, Braid, and Railroad Tycoon II on it from my steam library). Battery life is about 6 hours.

If you've got the cash i'm sure a small laptop is better, but I figured the more I spent on the portable, the less I'd have to spend upgrading the desktop.

 

[pumaz]

The big problem with netbooks is that nearly all of them are limited to 1024x600 which is just not enough screen real estate. I bought a Acer One when they first come out because i thought they looked cool and portable but after i had my fussy I sold it and continued to use my 13" MacBook Pro which i believe is the optimum size

 

[DVD Cinema]

I bought the eMachines eM350 for £199 when it first came out 6 months ago.

Great for surfing, e-mail and Youtube.

I looked at lots of the 11in ones, but the text is a lot smaller because of the higher resolution screen. 10in screen @ 1024x600 is more ideal for reading web pages at this size.

XP is snappy on it for what I do.

Windows 7 Stater is more limited to what you can customize and more resource hungry.

I wanted a cheap, small, quiet, cool computer to use on my lap, on the sofa and this is ideal.

Once you start going above this size, all the above increases subtantially.