A Guide to Netbooks

Laptops are certainly portable, but they can also be fairly heavy and the battery life can be short. Netbooks on the other hand are smaller and lighter with longer lasting batteries, giving users much more freedom.

The key concept is that content that normally fills up a hard drive – pictures, documents, videos, music – will either be stored online, as with Google documents, or on external flash memory.

Hardware is stripped down – in many models you will notice the absence of an optical drive (DVD player), instead it will rely on multiple USB slots and a card reader.

This helps to keep down weight, size and energy consumption. The keyboard will also be smaller – anything down to 83 per cent smaller than normal (as with the Asus Eee PC). Some models don’t even have removable batteries.

Netbooks generally run on a more basic operating system; Windows XP or a more limited Windows 7. Linux is the second most popular system, and normally runs the Ubuntu version 8.04, while Google is pushing forward its Chrome OS. Apple’s Mac OS could theoretically be run on certain netbooks, but this is a violation of Apple’s user agreement.

The choice is really yours – Dell’s Mini range for example offers XP or Ubuntu – so it’s down to what you’re most comfortable with.

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When choosing your netbook you really want to look at three criteria; portability, power and versatility, and how much of each you can get for your money.

Dell’s Mini 10 and Mini 10v are the latest top models from Dell; weighing around 1.2 kg with a 1Gb memory, the 6-cell battery option will give eight hours working time. They are a bit larger than some netbooks, with a whole extra inch on the screen size, but they seem to offer the perfect trade off between power, performance and portability.

For those who want the best stripped down netbook it’s often worth looking at the Asus Eee PC models; the new 1005 HA is fast with 50 second boot time, the keyboard is well set out for easier typing and works well for browsing, writing and some media playback.

Apple don’t make a netbook, preferring instead to concentrate on producing high end models. The latest upgrade to the basic MacBook however gives it seven hour wireless productivity and at just over 2kg it’s hardly heavy, likewise the MacBook Air weighs in at just 1.36 kg.

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Most software that you’ll find on your desktop or laptop you can get on your netbook, but you don’t want to slow down a sleek machine. So when choosing additional software you’ll want to stick with the leanest stuff out there; try Foxit’s PDF reader to cut down on the chunkier Acrobat for example, or AVG Free Antivirus, a fine alternative to other larger paid-for versions. Norton however offers a special netbook edition which gives you Norton quality and security while keeping your netbook light. Life can be dull without music, but iTunes can be a fairly hefty application so try WinAmp instead.

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Installing new software can be bit of a nightmare without an optical drive, as with a recent upgrade to Windows 7, although increasingly a lot of software is available as a download. Alternatively you can attach an external CD drive, though this somewhat detracts from the beautiful simplicity of netbooking.

Where the netbooks fall down is with situations where a lot of power or memory is required; gaming, movie and picture editing, music storage. A netbook however is not necessarily meant to be just a smaller laptop, so really what “lets down” a netbook are the very things that keep it mobile.

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Images by ndevil, jula julz, thomaspurves, Thales Barreto