I recently purchased one (Dell Mini 9), and I’m very pleased with it. It’s possibly the smallest netbook out there, and in my opinion the best-looking. Very well built, good wi-fi, and even though the CPU and graphics chip are basically pieces of tinfoil, it runs Windows 7 like a beaut.

I think the most part of the appeal of it for me was because it’s a tiny, shiny computer and that’s what I was after. It’s perfectly capable of running a browser, IM client, Office and Email, but novelty aside, I think it’s a fairly niche product.

My wife and I got a NetBook because we basically wanted an alternative to her laptop that was:
- Lighter
- Longer Battery Life

If I had the money to burn, I’d have purchased an ultra portable. Netbooks to me are simply Budget Ultra-Portables.

But it does what is needed. Excel for her academic stuff, web for us both. I can’t do software development on it, but I Can run/test the final software on it. With the right codecs, etc it even runs High Definition (720p) video files. [I know the screen is smaller than 720, it just means that the files on our server can just be straight copied over, instead of being re-encoded]

But the comment on customer dis-satisfaction is a valid one. Not only did my mum nearly buy one “to use in the livingroom”, PC World staff advised her it was the best option. I don’t know which applies, but the combination of ignorance and greed makes PC purchases difficult for those who don’t want to need to know the techy stuff…

I looked into buying a netbook, but decided against it since I often use my quite powerful Toshiba for programming and gaming. Getting a netbook would definitely have left me shaking with frustration every time I used it.

If you’re getting a netbook, all you really want is to have the objective of browsing the internet on a small screen. I have a smartphone for that…

Eee pc 1000HE. I love it! Needed a portable pc to use for travelling, work and internet, light and with a long battery life. This ticks all the boxes. I wanted a netbook not a laptop so i am happy. It runs XP fine, althouth a little slow at times with booting up programs.

Decent speaker and the screen is (10) enough to display whole web pages – even if i have to hold it too my face to read the tiny print. The hard drive is partitioned into primary drives – 2 unusable by me and will not let me re partition into any more. This is annoying as i want to have a partition for docs/pics only for easy norton ghost back ups. Will have to work on this. Hard disc is in two large partitions that can be elarged/shrunk to each other only. Not how i like to set up my discs.

Has a partition with a reset to ‘as supplied’ so you can rescue any major disasters.

Yes it has its little faults, however it is not designed as a laptop so as long as this is kept in mind when purchasing, I would recommend this to anyone. I would not recommend this as a primary computer.

My personal definition of netbook is based around the old Asus Eee PC 700. I don’t consider anything more than £250 or bigger than about 9″ screen to be a netbook.

So in my strangely defined world it appears that most manufacturers have stopped making netbooks,

I work in a school and we have a set of 60 Eee PC 1000Hs, as well as a couple of hundred laptops.

Our findings so far are:

1. Laptops have appalling battery lives, unless you fork out ridiculous sums for long-life versions. We have a set of 60 for use in our library (whch, hideously, is now referred to as the ‘Learning Resource Centre’) and the battery lives started off at 3 ~ hours maximum – after nearly two years of use, they have now degraded to 0 – 45 minutes. We recently purchased 60 extra chargers which are now bolted to the desks, effectively rendering the laptops as semi-portable desktops. In fact, we are currently proceeding through our Building Schools for the Future phasing and the school has decided to scrap almost all laptops in our refresh, in favour of desktops – at least when the screen or keyboard gets vandalised, you just swap it out!

2. Conversely, the Eee PCs have a fantastic battery life, even after over a year of use – still on the order of 5 1/2 hours, with wifi on. That’s a full day of lessons! As long as the teachers/pupils rememer to put them on charge, that is…

3. The screens on the Eee PCs are too small for quite a few programs – scrolling round web pages, Word docs, Moodle video demonstrations are all well and good sitting at home with your arse on the sofa and your feet on the table, but in a school setting, the kids just get frustrated. Plus, for our VI kids, they’re a total no-go – 10 inch-screens are obviously inadequate for those with optical disabilities, and the power of the Eee PCs is not sufficient to run our required magnification/VI software.

4. The keyboards are fine for the year groups we use them with (years 7 and 8 in Project Based Learning lessons) but for almost everyone else, they’re too small for regular typing. We do have a few Samsung NC10s recently bought for our Aim Higher lot (I bought one myself pretty much on release) and the keyboards are much better, but then the trackpad is a bit fiddly.

5. For educational use, the lack of an optical drive is no problem – at least for the pupils. Our network is locked down so no programs can be run anyway, but we don’t really want the kids to use optical drives – none of our desktops have them. Almost all software is network-installed and -distributed, so they really aren’t needed. Except when we need to rebuild them – then we use USB drives; our Eee PCs are not officially recognised by our network software supplier (RM), so we cannot easily install them via our usual methods. Luckily, nLite came to the rescue!

6. The power is sufficient for many of our programs – Office, Internet, Movie Maker, even some light Photoshopping – but they really cannot compare to a full-blown laptop, especially with the networking software overheads we have. A dual-core Ion chipset could do the job, but my experiences of the single-core Revo I have at home lead me to believe that the power just is not there yet – and indeed, our Managed Service IT company for BSF has informed me that even the dual-core Ion would not meet the strict SLAs and KPIs that will be in place.

For personal use, I think netbooks and nettops are fantastic – I use my NC10 on train journeys, school trips (would have gone mad otherwise on the 14 hour ski trip to Austria! Plus it’s great for downloading photos from cameras, etc), in cafes – even if you don’t take it out of the house, it’s still a darn sight easier to move around than even a lighter laptop. My Revo is excellent as a competent media streamer – rather than use an extender such as a 360, I merely use Vista Home Premium and point it to the shares – it uses less power than an extender and can play more formats more capably, for not much more. Plus, I can browse the Internet, play games on it and more!

I also think other devices that are related but on the periphery are handy too – like the O2 Joggler (which also uses the Atom CPU). I know PC Pro were not too fond of it – I agree that its calendar functionality needs some improvement – but it’s excellent as a media device, photo frame AND calendar. Very handy to stream music and video into the kitchen while cooking or ironing.

I think there are going to be some huge knock-on effects from the Atom/Ion (which, let’s face it, are what people mean when they talk about netbooks) – there is absolutely no reasons why in a year or two’s time that phones cannot have an Ion chipset in. The technology is so close, it will not be long before your main computing device is the one you carry in your pocket and all you do is hook it up to extras like monitors, projectors, keyboards, or an extension of cloud computing if you need the extra processing power.

PC Pro should ask this question again in five to ten years, when the kids all have phones that are many times more powerful than today’s netbooks – and actually capable of being used as truly portable computers.

I’ve had two Netbooks over the last year (One got nicked). Both Acer Aspire models. The first a SD version with 512Mb of Ram and Linpus Linux installed. I got it for when myself and the wife went travelling. I stuck Open Office on it, Firefox and Thunderbird and to all intense purposes it worked very well and did what was asked. When I tried to stick on a linux version of my streaming media software it started to crawl though.

My theft replacement is another Acer Aspire. This time with 1Gig of Ram and a 160Gb hard disk – bought new for a cool £149 from Expansys. (BARGAIN!)

Out of curiosity I wondered what it would be like with XP on it. So after much web research I created a bootable USB version of XP and loaded it on. To my surprise this little belter of a machine handled it with ease. So I risked sticking office on it. Again, no problems. I can even multi-task in the blink of an eye between excel and word. I’ve since loaded all my mp3’s and video on to it and it even copes very well with streaming these to other rooms in my house.

So now, I keep it in my office on the side board, next to my router. It’s unassuming, almost silent and takes up very little power. And I can take it when I go on holiday for searching for things to do or checking reservations etc. Basically – for accessing the net on the move – isn’t that what it was built for? But also, if I want to do some work then it can handle it too.

But let’s throw in something else into the mix here. I’ve subsequently invested in another Acer machine. This time the 18.4″ desktop replacement with Vista preloaded. Mainly for more powerful office work, game playing and the occasional video edit.

One of the things I like about my original Acer netbook was that it’s OS loaded in under 15seconds. Something even a machine with 4Gig of Ram a pretty fast processor and half decent video card couldn’t do with Vista.

So I now dual boot a stripped down version of Ubuntu and Vista on the “big” Acer. It means if I just want to quickly check the net for something then I don’t have to wait on Vista loading.

So the point is – is there a point ? – oh yes. It depends on the needs of the user AND what operating system is loaded as to whether or not a netbook will be a useful tool.

1. As a way of browsing the net – 8 out of 10
2. Working away for hours on end in office (If you’ve got the right Netbook) 8 out of 10
3. As a faux-media server – 8 out of 10
4. Gaming laptop or for running powerful apps like Final Cut – 2 out of 10
5. A quick loading OS – 9 out of 10 (only if linux is on it)

I got an HP 2133 for 200 Euros from a friend who bought it intending to skin it with Mac OS X before realising there was no way with the VIA Processor. Yes it’s too hot after an hour, battery dead after two, and slow but the screen is phenomenal and it attracts compliments wherever I take it. The keyboard is miraculous to type on, even better than my girlfriend’s Samsung NC10. I couldn’t be happier with this little machine, which is a welcome lugaround replacement for my Dell XPS 1530

I havent brought a netbook yet, but was about to buy the first eee701 and even the eee901 simply cos they were cheap and they worked, now the prices are always above the £300 (inc vat but no inc delivery), so they are a no. I personally cant believe people have been conned and fooled by hype and marketing by the light and portable arguement, but for mediocre processing power, The price you are paying does not justify them anymore, if your paying this why can it not have a standard laptop power? you can easily pick up a full laptop for the amounts being paid. Yes my arguement is simply about the cost, companies have ripped the OLPC idea and fed us this without anyone benefitting but themselves. and if battery life is so woeful in some of them, why not nick the other charming idea of the OLPC, windup power?

I picked up a refurbished Dell Mini 9 and hackintoshed it into a ‘MacBook Nano.’ I have a perfectly good MacBook Pro which is my primary laptop computer here at home, but I’m about to head overseas for two weeks (vacation! Finally!), and I don’t really want to haul along a large and somewhat pricy piece of equipment just to do e-mail back home and so on. Hence my little netbook; it’s hardly something I’d use as my day-to-day machine, but for doing e-mail at WiFi hotspots and keeping a travel journal, it will be more than sufficient.

Surprisingly, if you keep the library size down, it even can run Aperture passably well; I’ll be able to pull photos off of my camera and prepare them for uploading to Flickr at the next WiFi spot.

Would I use this as my primary day-to-day computer? No way on earth. Will I use it as a cheap e-mail/photo station while I’m traveling, so I don’t have to haul around a much larger machine (and one that would leave me much more heartbroken were it lost)? Oh, you bet.

Asus EeePC 1000H
£299

Purchased to replace my wife’s old laptop because:

> I know how to administrate and like XP whereas I wanted to avoid Vista and don’t have the time or inclination to get to grips with Linux
> Highly portable (it gets carried around the house and garden a lot)
> Great battery life
> Good price
> Good experience with the brand
> Solid basic spec incl BT, 802.11x, and webcam but without bells and whistles that aren’t needed

In practice it has fitted the bill beautifully and she is delighted with her web browsing / e-mail / MSN / SKYPE / streaming music from our media server usage of it.

Mods have been to upgrade to 2MB RAM and to replace the standard wireless card with an Atheros one that provides more consistent connection.

The only area where the 1000H with humble single core Atom comes close to disappointing is BBC iPlayer; no matter how I optimize performance the frame rate is at best “okay” and usually jittery compared to my always silky smooth Lenovo T61 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo on the same home network fed by the same internet pipe.

The key question is whether I would buy another? Yes.

@Paul Ockenden

“My personal definition of netbook is based around the old Asus Eee PC 700. I don’t consider anything more than £250 or bigger than about 9″ screen to be a netbook.

So in my strangely defined world it appears that most manufacturers have stopped making netbooks,”

I agree totally; I have an Asus 901 — the same physical size as the old 701 (which I also have) but with a larger screen. It really is the perfect size for potability and taking notes.

I attend many geek events and I am surprised by the number of people that still use pen and paper for taking notes. My experience of this is that when one returns home the paper is never filed and is eventually lost or inadvertently destroyed. By using the netbook the data is already on the system and can be diced and sliced, and then filed and backed up as required,.

Richard

I bought an NC10 for use repairing WISP equipment located in Roofspaces, Attics etc. Its small size but long battery life makes this job much easier coupled with long battery life and a screen bright enough to “light the ground beneath my feet” as I make my way across rafters to get to the equipment.

I still think that Netbooks would benefit from built in touch screens, but the conversions available online are easy enough to follow to upgrade the netbooks yourself.

Our family travel a lot between Ireland and the UK by Ferry and find the NC10 to be useful as a mobile entertainment and browsing platform.

Recently though I have got hold of a number of ex-corporate Dell Latitude D410 and HP NC2400 Ultra Portables. I find that with the 12.1″ screens and full siezed keyboards, and a much lower purchase price these machines (with the addition of a new battery) are probably better for travelling use. Particularly the HP2400 with its built in Optical drive, although the Dell D410 is far better built.

I put the Dell D410’s into primary schools as a cheap alternative to new Desktop PC’s. They have been well received, though even at 12.1″ people often wonder if the screen size is still “too small.”

But for testing and roof work the NC10 is still king…

^^Hadn’t seen those before.

I guess its a compromise with the smaller screen and higher price tag. Hmmm.

free downloads for ipod nano…

I am happy that I found your post here….

During the last decade, the functionality and capability of notebooks has increased to meet and often exceed that offered in a similarly priced desktop.