Notebook or Netbook Advice Needed

[marianne202]

Hey All!

Ok, so I need some advice from the IT guru's and computer savvy group here. I'm looking at doing quite a bit of traveling over the next year and thought with the new airline baggage charges I would try to trade in my bulky, heavy laptop for a newer, smaller notebook or netbook computer. I did some research and find mixed reviews. Some say that a netbook is fine for email or social networking, but not really good for other applications. I'm having trouble even finding anything about notebook computers...are these not made anymore?

My HP laptop is about 2-3 years old and it is big and heavy. I will need something that I can take with me and still work on my online classes while away, so it must do all the typical MS office functions and connect to the internet, even overseas. I also need it to hold a lot of material, as we are traveling this summer for two weeks and will want to transfer all our pictures off the camera memory card to the computer to be able to reuse our memory card. Then we would want to download the pictures when we get home. It seems that the netbooks don't have a lot of memory to be able to do that.

I'm hoping someone here can give us some suggestions. When we travel over the summer we will most likely be carrying the computer in our backpack, so it must be sturdy and lightweight.

Please let me know what you suggest. I can't afford $1,000 for an Apple laptop, so please don't suggest one. It would be nice, but not in the cards right now. Thanks for your help!