How To Determine If You Can Do More With Less Computing Power

The best-selling portable computer on the market right now is the netbook format. I personally own one and, said honestly, is the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Why? Six hours of battery life with the 6 cell battery and ultra light so I doesn’t bother my shoulder when I carry it around, that’s why.

But let’s say for the moment you’re not interested in a netbook but want a new super-cheap desktop PC from Dell, which at the time of this writing is at the same price point as a netbook, that being just a tick under $300. It should be noted that doesn’t include a monitor, but heck, that’s cheap. A box with lower system specifications is commonly referred to as a "nettop."

Either offering is not nearly as powerful as a "standard" desktop with 2, 4 or 6 cores on the CPU, 4GB of RAM, a fast dedicated graphics card and gobs of hard drive space.

So how do you determine whether or not a cheap netbook or nettop would be worth buying at all?

Before I tell you how, there are 3 facts to bear in mind when it comes to daily computing.

1. Most people don’t need more than 100GB of space.

My netbook has a 160GB hard drive. Some upon knowing this would say, "Bah! Small! I’d fill that up in a second!" For most people this simply isn’t true.

The three things that fill up a hard drive faster than anything else are, in order, video, audio and images.

If you don’t edit video, don’t download massive amounts of MP3s and don’t have a digital camera that exports super-ultra-high photo quality, you don’t need more than 100GB, period.

On my netbook I run Windows 7 RC, Ultimate Edition. This is the biggest, baddest Windows you can run. I also have a full edition of OpenOffice and a ton of other apps installed – and I’m only using 16GB of the 160GB drive. All the rest of it is free for use. Heck, I could get away with a 60GB drive and still be fine.

2. Most apps don’t require a ton of horsepower.

My netbook is primarily used for writing, communications, internet browsing, some image editing, maybe a video edit on rare occasion and not much else. The apps needed to do those things absolutely do not require a fast PC box whatsoever. In fact the only time my netbook chokes – but doesn’t die or crash – is with web sites that use too much Flash content. (Movie web sites are notorious for that.)

Most apps will run just as smooth and quick on a computer box with lower specs. I’ve personally proven this to be true time and time again.

3. XP is a bottleneck.

When I first bought my netbook, it came preinstalled with XP. After using it for a few days I almost returned the thing because it ran like crap – no joke.

Figuring I was going to return it regardless of what I did to it, I installed Windows 7.

My netbook basically said this to me: "THANKS, DUDE! Now I can really work!"

The difference between the way XP and 7 performs is like night and day. Windows 7 runs circles around XP. All the wonky issues disappeared when I installed that OS on the netbook. It runs flawlessly.

In addition to that, the apps I thought I couldn’t run in XP did run in 7 because it’s threading processes are so much better.

When I try, repeat, try to tell people on PCMech how great 7 is, the stick-in-the-mud fuddy duddy users come out of the woodwork and say "XP RUNS FINE, I WON’T BE UPGRADING." Their loss. I know how much better 7 runs. It is absolutely not a "patched Vista." It may look like Vista, but what’s under the hood will impress you every time you use it. I’d stake my reputation on that. That’s how much confidence I have in the product.

Configure a "crappy" virtual PC to test your apps and see how well they run

The easiest possible way to know whether your apps will work on a computer that has notably low specifications is to simply use VirtualBox, configure a very-low-spec simulated PC box with only 1024×768 resolution, install your apps and see whether it works well or not.

The only two things you need to do this are:

1. VirtualBox (free)
2. A Windows XP CD

Even if you don’t have the license for your XP CD, you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 to 30 days to test your stuff, and that’s more than enough time to determine whether or not a low-spec box will do the job for you.

I use a low-spec XP box periodically for writing articles on PCMech and this is what it looks like:

My virtual PC is only configured with 512MB RAM, a tiny 10GB virtual hard drive and 64MB video RAM. That’s it. And it runs pretty much anything I throw at it.

If you configure a virtual PC with similar specs to this and it will run your apps easily with XP, it’s more or less guaranteed it will run perfectly on a new nettop or netbook with Windows 7.

The only thing that would prevent specific apps from running are compatibility issues. It is true that some older apps will not run in Vista or 7. For this fix, simply go to the web site where the program was authored from and see if there are Vista/7 compatibility issues listed or not. For a quicker way, use Google and search for "[name of program here] vista problem" or "[name of program here] vista compatibility." If there are any problems, Google will return the web sites that talk about it quickly.

Some notes about virtual vs. real hardware

Virtual PCs don’t accommodate for actual hardware since the environment is all software based. But bear in mind nettops and netbooks come provided with only the most basic of hardware. The chances of a hardware incompatibility only lie in what you would connect to the computer box via USB, such as a printer, specialized keyboard, specialized mouse, etc. But bear in mind Windows 7 is compatible with thousands and thousands of different devices. To be on the safe side you can go to the manufacturer’s web site where USB hardware was made to see if there are specific Vista/7 drivers. If there are, you’re good to go.

The speed of programs will be faster on a native system compared to virtual because you don’t have the bottleneck of the virtual environment slowing you down. What this means is if an app in a virtual PC proves to be choppy or stutter a bit, chances are that won’t happen at all on native hardware.

Remember that 7 has better threading than XP. This means you can run more at once, and it will run more smoothly with the 7 OS. If for example you find that after launching 5 "heavy" apps in a virtual XP that the OS takes a long time to switch between tasks, 7 will allow for task switching much faster.