netbooks

[weakwarrior]

Anyone have a netbook? Other than gaming what are the other disadvantages?

[Hammerskjold]

Anyone have a netbook? Other than gaming what are the other disadvantages?

I don't have one personally right now, but I have used it.

Off the top of my head the disadvantages would be similar to a laptop vs full desktop.

You can run some games, but obviously not something resource intensive like say, Crysis. Some 2d\sprite based games are ok though.

Same with any other resource heavy apps. No problems playing audio\videos on some models, but don't expect to do video editing on a netbook. (At least with technology at the time of this writing.)

Smaller screen size and keyboard might be too small for some folks.


Out of all that though, my personal opinion is the biggest potential disadvantage for some folks is the keyboard and screen size. For some people it's a dealbreaker.

The rest, IMO is not really a disadvantage anymore than a 3 door hatchback vs a 5 door hatchback vs a sedan vs pickup truck vs sportscar. They are what they are, and they're fine for their intended use. ie: even if a netbook has the computing power to say do heavy video editing, the smaller screen\keyboard might limits things a bit. And if those are increased substantially, well then is it really a netbook anymore etc etc.

They are well priced for what they are IMO, with some models and options their battery life is pretty good (5-7 hours approx). Physically it is less cumbersome than some laptops in the cafe environment, if you're into that.

Are you browsing for one?

[weakwarrior]

Are you browsing for one?

I will start law school in a month and I want to have something light which I can take to classes and libraries and on which I can run Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Offhand that's pretty much all I can think of wanting. If anyone can suggest other things I might not be thinking of please let me know. The one I am conciously omitting is gaming and I realize that I will have to sacrifice that for portability (and price).

[roguebanshee]

I will start law school in a month and I want to have something light which I can take to classes and libraries and on which I can run Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Offhand that's pretty much all I can think of wanting. If anyone can suggest other things I might not be thinking of please let me know. The one I am conciously omitting is gaming and I realize that I will have to sacrifice that for portability (and price).

The only thing I can think of that could ruin it would be specialist software that won't run on a netbook for some reason. The law school should be able to provide answers as to what you're going to need.

In general, they should be able to handle any office task you put them to.

[kandrathe]

Anyone have a netbook? Other than gaming what are the other disadvantages?

Your school should have some recommendations, and perhaps deals on some models as well. There are advantages in having the most ubiquitous hardware on campus, in support, and in having the campus IT department testing their services for your environment. The further you stray from common, the more you will need to spend your own time being your own IT support, and the less time you will be studying what you should be studying.

[eppie]

I will start law school in a month and I want to have something light which I can take to classes and libraries and on which I can run Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Offhand that's pretty much all I can think of wanting. If anyone can suggest other things I might not be thinking of please let me know. The one I am conciously omitting is gaming and I realize that I will have to sacrifice that for portability (and price).

I think the main question you have to ask yourself is if you want this netbook next to your normal desktop or notebook. I like them and think they would do fine for what you need them for. So is the ease of having something ultraportable worth 300 dollars then buy one. If not just use your own laptop.
If you don't have a laptop but a desktop at home, I would say 'go for that netbook'.

( I don't own one so I can't tell you just how good or bad they work)

[Concillian]

Anyone have a netbook? Other than gaming what are the other disadvantages?

Netbooks are essentially as powerful as an old Pentium III 1000 or so. That's really all you need for doing word, excel, internet, email, etc... but doing anything more than that (photoshop, gaming, watching 1080p h.264 movies, etc...) becomes an issue.

That's really all you need to know. If you can do what you need with a ~1GHz processor, the netbook will work for you. If you can't, then you either need a second computer or your one computer needs to be more powerful than a netbook.

[Hammerskjold]

I will start law school in a month and I want to have something light which I can take to classes and libraries and on which I can run Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Offhand that's pretty much all I can think of wanting. If anyone can suggest other things I might not be thinking of please let me know. The one I am conciously omitting is gaming and I realize that I will have to sacrifice that for portability (and price).

Good luck on your studies first off.

Slightly echoing what others have said, looking at your school and what their students are using will probably help your decision immensely.

Off the top of my head again, another option would be looking at smaller laptops\notebooks.
Potential good news, right now there's an overlap and competition between netbooks and small notebooks and if you can snag a deal, a winner is you.;)

ie: http://www.itworld.com/hardware/72367/lapt...ip-under-300-us

One possible advantage I can think of laptops\notebooks have over some netbooks is it can be easier to dock. While it's not impossible to say, type up an all nighter using only a netbook, it can get real old real fast. Though probably not a big issue if you already have a desktop and a netbook is for doing secondary duty as others have mentioned.

[Kevin]

Anyone have a netbook? Other than gaming what are the other disadvantages?

Well I'm typing this right now on one, we have an evaluation one from HP.

I've been looking it for all of about 3 minutes now. I don't like the keyboard. My hands are a bit too big for it. But I can type reasonably well on it. Just not a fan.

The widescreen format but small screen is not really great for web browsing either, as you need to do a lot of vertical scrolling on a 1024 x 576 resolution and there is no scroll wheel, I'm not a fan of grabbing the bars and dragging with a touch pad. Though compared to a cell phone it's a step up. I'd suggest getting used to the F11 key in Firefox. :)

It's light, it seems solid on the construction.

This thing is running full blown XP SP3, don't know if that was what it came with or installed by IT on it.

Battery seems to charge fairly quickly. It was at 18% charge just a few minutes ago is now at 25%. I'm not sure how long it will run on that. I'm not getting a time estimate till out of power when I take it off wall power.

If you have an external DVD drive (killing some of the portability aspect of it) it seems it'd be decent for video playback.

It can drive an external monitor via a VGA output fairly well. I plugged it into my 19in flatpanel and it chugged right along. Claims it can drive up 2048 x 1530 on the external.

Has an OK built in speaker. Built in web cam as well. Easy to get to headpone jack. 3 USB ports on the sides. Card reader and a standard ethernet port on the side as well. No prots on the back.

For a couple hundred bucks as an e-mail reader/chat/web broswers it's not bad. 2GB of ram, 160 GB HDD, 1.6GHz N270 Atom processor. Office runs fine on it, I bet if you could fiddle the screen resolution and use an external mouse D2 would play just fine on it too.:)

The external power brick is fairly small as well.

Screen has good brightness and good viewing angles as well.

The lid doesn't have a latch, just some pressure springs to keep it closed.

Seems functional though.

[weakwarrior]

[quote name='Gnollguy' date='Jul 28 2009, 12:38 PM' post='170357']
I'd suggest getting used to the F11 key in Firefox. :)... and a standard ethernet port on the side as well. /quote]
First off thanks for the evaluation. 2 quick questions: what's F11 do? Do you mean the ethernet card isn't built in to the system?

[Kevin]

Hmm the forum gets mad when I try to respond directly to your post so I'll respond to my own.

First off thanks for the evaluation. 2 quick questions: what's F11 do? Do you mean the ethernet card isn't built in to the system?

F11 toggles full screen in Firefox. It drops off the menu, address, title bars, button bars, status bars, etc. Gives you more visible on the screen.

The ethernet card is built in. I was testing it on our wireless network. I was enumerating the ports when I mentioned the ethernet (RJ-45?) port.

The lack of a DVD drive though hurts. It does allow it to be more compact, but for me that would have me looking at a small form factor laptop with a drive in it, because it really feels like it would be an excellent little portable movie platform.

[Frag]

The lack of a DVD drive though hurts. It does allow it to be more compact, but for me that would have me looking at a small form factor laptop with a drive in it, because it really feels like it would be an excellent little portable movie platform.

It's because of the power req as well as the noise, the littletop's with DVD drives sound like a 747 about to take off... /vrroom

~FragB)

[kandrathe]

It's because of the power req as well as the noise, the littletop's with DVD drives sound like a 747 about to take off... /vrroom

Back in the late eighties, I read a paper on using crystals as solid state storage devices. The theoretical storage density is the size of each crystal atom. The crystal substance when hit with one color of laser would absorb energy and elevate an electron to a higher orbital. When hit with a different color would drop the electron back to the lower orbital and emit a photon. Being that the storage could be a portion of a sphere without the need for spinning, the accuracy and density can be controlled by rotating a very small mirror for lasing and sensing. The closest thing to this technology is the Digital Multilayer Disk.

[weakwarrior]

Part 2:

Anyone know anything about these portable keyboards (such as adesso akb-220) which are hitting the market. I find netbooks a bit small for my clumsy fingers (though maybe I'll get used to it) and I was wondering about ways I could get around this.