The Right Click » netbooks http://pillarcc.com/blog Just another WordPress weblog Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:14:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.3 en hourly 1 What are Netbooks? http://pillarcc.com/blog/2009/06/what-are-netbooks/ http://pillarcc.com/blog/2009/06/what-are-netbooks/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:21:50 +0000 Richard Lee http://therightclickblog.com/?p=165 The term ‘Netbook’ is appearing more and more on sites and blogs related to the newest and greatest of technology. Dell, Asus, and Samsung (among others) are building and selling them. Yet, what are they? How do they compare to Notebooks? Why would you want one?
Netbooks are really small laptops designed with ‘net-centric computing’ in mind. Essentially, they’re really affordable machines that are designed for basic applications only, be it surfing the Internet, taking notes in college, or playing music. Anything beyond that, such as Photoshop, watching movies (such as from a DVD), or other advanced uses, is possible, but the netbook will run really, really slow.

This is due to the nature of netbooks and why they are so affordable (a new one will run you anywhere from $300 to $500 on average): compared to normal laptops, they are very underpowered. They don’t have the powerful processors present in most notebooks today. They don’t have the fancy graphics processors.

Thanks to this, though, the battery life of a netbook is much longer than what you get with notebooks: the battery that generally comes with the netbook will last you from 4 to 6 hours, give or take. However, you can get batteries for you netbook that will last you from 7 to 10 hours, and possibly more. This lets you leave your charger at home as you go about your day to day activities. Given the relative size of netbooks (they are quite a bit smaller than their notebook cousins), it’s easy to carry them around and pull them out when needed (or when you have a few minutes to check your e-mail).

Netbooks will come with either Windows XP or a version of Linux on it. There is a rumored Apple Netbook coming, but as of yet Apple has stated that they are not interesting in entering this arena. Sorry, Apple fans: perhaps in the near future this will change.

So, how does a netbook compare to a notebook? We’ve already covered it a little above, but below is a list of the pros and cons of netbooks when compared to notebooks.

Pros include:
-Longer Battery Life
-More Portable
-More Affordable

Cons include:
-Less Powerful Hardware
-No DVD Drive (everything is transferred over USB on netbooks)
-Can’t Handle more Resource Intensive Applications
-No Mac netbook… yet

Netbooks are the affordable solution for on the go computing.

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