Do You Want a Netbook?

by David Risley on Aug 25, 2009 | 52 comments

The netbook has been getting really popular lately with the “good enough” crowd. Rich recently joined them, and now so have I. Rich grabbed a Dell Inspiron Mini 10V. I just purchased an Asus Eee PC 1000HA from Newegg.

I just wanted to take a gauge of the PCMech readership. So, I wet my finger, stick it into the wind, and just ask. Do you want a netbook? And why?

Here is why I personally see the netbook being attractive:

Tiny. They are ultra portable.
Long battery life. The netbook I just bought is advertised to have a 10 hour battery life, although users are saying it is more like 7 hours. Either way, that’s incredible.
Just Enough. Face it, most PC users spend most of their time online. Our needs are few: basic office tasks, email, and surfing the web. As much as I love my $2,000 Macbook Pro, it is overkill for those few basic tasks.

So, why did I buy a tiny netbook running Windows XP when I am a happy Mac user? Well, for the above reasons. I will continue using my Macbook Pro. However, there are times when all I need is the basics and battery life is important.

The other day, I was at a Panera Bread in Tampa to meet up with some people and talk business for a few hours. When I opened my Macbook Pro screen, I found I had less than 10% of my battery remaining. I was then forced to relocate inside the restaurant in order to found an outlet. 10% batter will run my Macbook Pro for no more than 20 minutes – tops. At the same time, all I would need the computer for was to jot down a few notes into my web-based whiteboard.

In October, I will be flying out to Vegas for BlogWorld, non-stop on Southwest Airlines. The flight from Tampa to Vegas is a 5-hour flight. Now, last time I made that trip, my Macbook Pro made it about 80% of the way on battery. Mind you, that was with wifi disabled, bluetooth disabled, and the screen brightness turned down to the point where I could barely see it. This netbook could make it all the way to Vegas and half-way back again with no recharge.

I prefer OS X to Windows XP by far, but for the tasks I am going to use this machine for, the OS really doesn’t matter that much.

So, that’s me. What about you?

Do you already own a netbook? If so, why did you buy it?

And if you don’t own one, would it be something you might buy at some point?

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somewhatoverthetop
I bought the Dell mini-10, probably during the first few weeks of introduction. Now, I had been living with a desktop only as I have been retired for some time and really in most cases had no reason to upgrade nor did I need the portability. So I thought! I soon realized what I had been missing. I will say, I no longer have the little thing. I returned it for a credit and took the plunge to acquire a full featured, though med screen size, laptop. My desk tops memory is at the point where it is so low, it is affecting its performance. I recently put together a new one.
I miss the little thing, for all the reasons in your articles. Portability, battery life, the fact it had the footprint to leave me some room on the table I may be using whether at home or at a consulting appointment.
In my case, I found the screen size tiring on my eyes. Dell has a convienient zoom feature but sometimes using it is cumbersome with having to scroll the pages so much. I also found, that I could not live without a disc drive.
The flash drives, have a use, just not enough. By the time I bought an external Disk drive with its cords and such. The bag to travel was as big as toting around a full featured laptop.
I would gladly accept one as a gift, maybe even buy one again. The darn things are great in so many ways.
If I hadn’t needed to replace my desktop and if my grandkids could have loaded some of their games more convienently I would have kept it. It really comes down to usage. I personally cannot wait until they come out with 2mb of Ram. I am impressed with them. I even adjusted to the slightly smaller keyboard without too much effort. They tend to make you sit a little straighter and type more precisely but hey, I am easily impressed when I look in the garage and see my first Apple 2 e (or c) and an old Commadore.
I did not have it long enough to see how much bouncing around it would take. A feature I hope they took into consideration being they are so portable they may take more of a pounding than a full featured, heavier laptop.
BHamil
I have no intention of buying a netbook. I do not traven very often, and the Acer laptop I bought my wife is great for our uses. The netbooks available are too small and not powerful enough for me. I may just be stuck in the past, but I like my computer to have a built in optical/DVD drive.
BigToe
I have had an HP Mini 1030 for 5 months, using it for travels mostly due to lightness and convenience. Got the16GB flash drive and also use a 16GB usb mini flash drive which contains my Firefox browser and assorted portable apps. Built in mic and camera are perfect for Skype. Did not want the extra size and weight from a larger battery. The 10.3 inch screen is amazingly large and one quickly adjusts to the size. Used at home as well on WiFi network while watching TV or in the bedroom or out in the yard. Larger keyboard (at 93% regular keyboard size) was a must for my larger hands; works quite well. Used mostly for web, email and word processing. Inexpensive convenience. Noticing a lot of students using them at schools for note taking; very portable and comfortable.
Joseph Bruch
I purchased a netbook for my grandson as he is starting college and will be using it as an ebook reader and email machine.
the one we chose was a Acer 10.1″ Aspire One AOD150-1920 Red Netbook PC. and he seems happy with it – it was not nent to be a replacement for his desktop machine or would I want one as a notebook but for his purpose it seems like a good idea
Tim K
As a tech, I have lots of computers and held off on the netbooks until now. I know and understand the limitation that far too many don’t know or understand. I will be looking at running something like MS Streets and Trips with GPS as my GPS got liberated. I hope the larger screen works out well with this application.
With its low power AC adapters, cheap inverts will help charge it while driving and can’t use it other than the GPS app. May look at a small solar panel for similar mobile charging option. For the car, saw a DIY car mount for a laptop holder using 2″ PVC, for a netbook it could be made much lighter, but will need to address strapping the netbook to the platform.
As to the batteries, enjoy the longer life of power on these units, but batteries loose capacity over time. Figure 2 years at best before you likely will have to replace them. Dell, I see wants $130 for 3 cell and $150 for 6 cell batteries and this is typical for battery replacements for any of our laptop/notebook/netbook solutions. Watch out for third party substitutes as sometimes they don’t work as advertised and my damage your computer.
Hope everyone enjoys their new tool and it works well for what they need and want to use it for.

http://www.menga.net Rich Menga
The Dell Mini 10 (not the 10v) has integrated GPS and navigation software. No need for Streets & Trips.

Jomama
I just received my new Asus Eee PC 900. Atom processor. Preloaded with Ubuntu. Crashed it trying to do too many updates at once. But it reloads from a hidden partition very easily.
So far I am liking it. I keep it next to my recliner so I can surf and check email w/o getting up and going all the way into another room!
Connected quickly to my wireless nw and supports WPA. Whats not to like.
Jim
I bought an Asus eeePC before I went on vacation to Mexico this spring. When you are trying to keep the weight down for an international flight having a small, easily packable, and relatively inexpensive netbook is great. I went with the Asus because they were the innovators in this market and offered the best battery life at the time. Now that I’m home I have it hooked into my bedroom stereo to use for streaming music. I will take it with me whenever I travel. I like the small footprint, easy portability, and long battery life. If I had it to do over today, I’d probably grab a 13″ Acer Timeline and enjoy the bigger screen and better resolution, but I’m not sorry I got the eeePC.

Jim
I should add that this Asus eeePC uses XP as the operating system. I considered running Ubuntu, but I wanted it to be easy for my wife to use and she’s used to XP. I immediately upgraded to 2GB RAM (that’s the max). It loads and runs much faster than my Dell Vostro 1000 with 2GB RAM running Windows Vista Home Basic.

Chris G
Having found dragging a full laptop from UK and around the US and Central America for a couple of months in two years was an awkward pain, I took the opportunity and got me a netbook autumn 2008. I dragged that around but it was no drag, being so very convenient despite the small 10 inch screen and no optical drive. When using for any length of time I would borrow a large monitor to run off my netbook and by adding a mini mouse and a USB memory key found no problems at all. As with all things small, the battery is also small but carefull usage was a perfect solution.
I have no regets and am highly pleased with it. My desktop recently popped it’s motherboard and was out of action for a couple of weeks and the netbook sat in it’s place with perfection.
jM
I really don’t like small screens, but I bought an Acer Aspire One with a 10″ screen for a recent trip to New York.
Why? 3 reasons:
First, the smaller size Netbook fits inside the hotel room safe, which seems like a much better alternative than just leaving it somewhere in the room, or taking it with me all the time. Most regular size laptops don’t.
Second, my fiancee’ has a Flip video camera (which she loves), and that holds about an hour of video equalling about 4GB of HD space. I could easily transfer the files by USB – and you can imagine how prolific she was in the Big Apple, so having 160 GBs of storage available was comfortable, and she was able to have a full charge and as much video space as she wanted every day. I found out on a cruise some time ago that finding a way to offload the video files was a challenge when you’re traveling – ever have to ask someone to let you download the software, then the videos, then transfer the stuff to a USB key, then return their laptop to it’s previous state? Not pretty… and takes a while too.
I was able to prepare for the trip, then connect easily for further information while we were actually on our tour bus side trips. We were able to get information that made getting around much easier than trying to opine what our choices would be from pamphlets. The small size made carrying it a breeze.
And I am very very comfortable with WinXP. I don’t use it very much other than that, but it’s nice to have something very portable for extemporaneous events. I can carry it all day.
http://liz@lizwilliams.org Elizabeth Williams
I was so excited to have a lighter weight laptop replacement that I bought an Acer on at the first opportunity. I spend a lot of time sitting in front of TV to be with my handicapped husband. The lighter weight and less heat is the best decision I’ve made in a long time. Wireless connection is fast, the keyboard is full size, and the screen is crisp and easy to read. I love it so much I gave my Hp laptop to my grandson. When I have to get up from the recliner quickly, it’s so much easier to manage the netbook that the full sized laptop, I wish I could have had one years ago.
Art D
I bought an Asus 904HA several months ago, specifically to take on an Alaskan cruise, and to be used for downloading pictures from my camera’s memory card.
I replaced the original 160GB hard drive with a 250GB, replaced the 1GB RAM module with a 2GB, and in place of the included Windows XP Home, installed Windows 7 RC Ultimate. Had to track down a few Asus-specific Vista drivers (which work well on Win7), but they were readily available. I added a few apps that I wanted, including the freeware Faststone Image Viewer, and it was ready to rock. I couldn’t do much editing with this setup, of course, but that was not the purpose of it. Being able to view and evaluate my photos on the 8.9 in. WSVGA screen at 1024 X 600 was infinitely better than trying to do so using the camera’s 3 in. LCD screen.
In addition to using my Asus for photo viewing and storage, I also use it for the usual web-oriented stuff–email, web surfing, etc. as well as some office-related tasks, and a few light games. All in all, it was a very good purchase, and has served me well; I wouldn’t travel without it.
http://liz@lizwilliams.org Elizabeth Williams
I was so excited to have a lighter weight laptop replacement that I bought an Acer at the first opportunity. I spend a lot of time sitting in front of TV to be with my handicapped husband. The lighter weight and less heat is the best decision I’ve made in a long time. Wireless connection is fast, the keyboard is full size, and the screen is crisp and easy to read. I love it so much I gave my Hp laptop to my grandson. When I have to get up from the recliner quickly, it’s so much easier to manage the netbook that the full sized laptop, I wish I could have had one years ago.
tom wimmer
Bought my wife a toshiba NB 205-312 net book for her birthday last week, downloaded her country and western music on a usb memory stick she played games and listen to her music on this net book for four hours had 56% battery life still available. Shes happy that works
http://cashgiftingnews.blogspot.com/2009/08/shea-korte-scam-boy.html Chuck
I saw the Asus Eee while at Best Buy a while back. I didn’t pull the trigger and buy it right then because I wanted to check out some reviews. I was impressed with the battery life and all the reviews were positive. Your article has convinced me to give it a try. Thanks.
Anthony
I purchased a second hand EeePC from eBay for AUD$150 mainly so I could connect to my hosting server using VNC if there was an issue while I was interstate for work. Best purchase I made.
http://www.vintage-life.net/2009/08/something-o... Jerry @ vintage wedding dress
We bought it last week. We’re very happy that we’ve got a new laptop. We spent many hours sitting in front of it. We played games, listened songs, watched movie and we had a chat with our friends.
http://www.IdentifyYourself.com Sue V.
I do not yet own a netbook; but want one and am currently researching options.
Why? For the same reasons you mentioned: Portability and long battery life. I carry a messenger bag daily and always seem to have too much stuff to lug around.
I plan to buy a netbook and transfer as much of my information to it as possible. It will take the place of a PDA, an address book, and numerous “to do” notes.
I am already a PC Mechanic newsletter subscriber.
http://N/A chuck
Have not got one yet but with the amount of time spent on road definatly want one more portable.
Harold Boettger
I am thinking of purchasing a netbook as a light weight and easy way to check my email and to surf the web without having to get out my MacBook. I currently use my iPod Touch to do this but i’d like a faster machine with a larger screen.
http://gaylordshead.blogspot.com Gaylord Cohen
Apparently, it turned out I DON’T like Puppy Linux, after all…too many programs I wanted to install would NOT work, because of too many missing dependancies…so now, I have switched my Dell Mini netbook BACK to Ubuntu, which DID originally come with the netbook. Puppy was nice, but it’s better to stick with what REALLY works for me…and that is UBUNTU!
http://www.digitalcameraprinters.org Tiffany Lanning
I’ve had my Kindle for about three weeks now and I absolutely love it. It took me a few days to get used to the screen flash for the page turn, but I don’t even notice it now. Downloading books is incredibly easy and I find that I’m reading far more than I was before I owned the device. I’ve downloaded several from Project Gutenberg as well as from Amazon itself. Books I never would have thought to read before are now on my Kindle.
I even took it to the emergency room a few days ago and it saved me. I was in the waiting room for almost an hour, and waited another 3 once I was in a room. I wasn’t sick – I was bit by a potentially rabid cat – so I would have been extremely bored without it. I didn’t have time to search my bookshelf for a book before leaving for the ER, so I just grabbed my kindle and had almost 100 books to choose from.
This thing is amazing, and I’m so happy I bought it.