Notebook or Netbook Advice Needed

[irnbru]

Second the Dell recommendations; generally functional devices at a reasonable price. Currently using a Dell Inspiron mini 10 (1012) notebook for 7 months which came at no cost with a 3g dongle contract. The three most important factors in choosing a notebook for me were:

Battery life
Keyboard
Screen estate

Was using an old Dell Latitude D500 previously but needed something a bit more portable and with battery life. Didn't want to sacrifice working screen estate and absolutely didn't want to end up typing for any periods with a strange and potentially uncomfortable 'pretty' keyboard.

The 1012's battery lasts on average for about six hours. That's a good amount of time to do some study, work or watch a couple of films when travelling. The keyboard is one of the biggest on a netbook and was the main selling point for me. The screen does a healthy 1024x600 but newer models go up to 1366x768 which is a bigger (widescreen) resolution than the old D500 (1024x768 - the minimum width you probably want to look at 'normal' websites with). I don't think I could work with an 800x600 screen. Installed winxp sp3 instead of the win7 os it came with to increase working screen space a little and because it's what I'm used to.

The only down side to the mini 10 is that the touchpad's buttons are built into the pad itself which would make it pretty horrible to use. If I'm carrying the mini 10 to go anywhere with it, a small, external USB mouse also goes with it.

Whatever you choose, try and get a look at the device before you commit to buying; play with the keyboard and ask yourself if you'd be happy working with it for any amount of time. Check the specs for screen resolution as that's one of the harder things to replace after purchase (if at all) and more is always better. Check the battery life through reviews.

Most any netbook/notebook/laptop will have a built-in wifi card.

Netbooks are notebooks, these days. Originally, the EeePC NETbooks were almost like a laptop but running with cut down OS's, solid state storage, tiny screens, etc. For the last year or so, the tech has reached an affordable level and the notebook/netbook difference doesn't exist any more. Basically this means current notebook/netbooks are just small laptops which can do pretty much everything a standard laptop can do. However (caveat) there are still cheap old-style netbooks floating around running windows CE on risc processors, etc. These are basically the equivalent of a big mobile phone Anything running windows xp, vista or 7 will almost certainly be of the 'little laptop' variety and what you want.

Hope you get yourself something comfortable at a good price

[toddsbiyj]

Agreed. I have an 2009 EeePC 10in running Windows7 and love it.

[P00057870]

What if you need to work in MicroSoft OFFICE, though. I was told some time ago that the 2007 version required a minimum of 2 GB for it to run properly and it seems that most of the netbooks advertize only 1 GB.

????/

[P00057870]

By the way, about 2 weekends ago in the local Sunday adds, Target had an Acer netbook for about $199. I ran into a man at a local McDonalds who had it and loved it for his college studies and said he had gotten it on sale at Walmart for about the same price.

Any feedback on that product??? Like others posting here, have been wondering about getting one for travel reasons.

[ShotoJuku]

By the way, about 2 weekends ago in the local Sunday adds, Target had an Acer netbook for about $199. I ran into a man at a local McDonalds who had it and loved it for his college studies and said he had gotten it on sale at Walmart for about the same price.

Any feedback on that product??? Like others posting here, have been wondering about getting one for travel reasons.

I have two (one for Wife and one for Son) and they are great; and so are the Acer Aspire0ne Netbooks!!

[toddsbiyj]

What if you need to work in MicroSoft OFFICE, though. I was told some time ago that the 2007 version required a minimum of 2 GB for it to run properly and it seems that most of the netbooks advertize only 1 GB.

????/

I use openoffice.org and it workd just fine. I was using MS Office with WinXP before I caught a virus and reformatted with Win7. Never had any issues with only 1GB. In saying that - I have seriously considerd upgrading to 2GB just for a generally little quicker system although I am happy wiht just 1GB.

[P00057870]

So, apparently you CAN add additional memory???? I had asked the salespeople at the local BrandsMart and they could not answer the question.

[toddsbiyj]

For my specific PC - yes. I can't speak for all of them but I have a slot, on the bottom, with a small cover that unscrews, I pop out the 1GB and pop in the new 2GB.

[P00057870]

Now we know of another thing to check for.

[CLEP101]

For the traveling that I do, I bought an Acer Aspire one mini laptops. I think they are about 10 inches or less and don't weigh much. I paid $175 for it. It came with Windows XP but I upgraded it with Windows 7 and all the programs I would need. HP and Dell and other brands sell similar mini laptops for around $250. Shop around before you spend hundreds more.