Loving The Right Type of Netbook

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The tech section of The Wall Street Journal has a review from a user who is in a love-hate relationship with her Dell Mini Inspiron 10 netbook. Her problem is that she bought a Dell. I totally love my Samsung N120 netbook. Besides the usual dangers of buying from Dell, it is well worth paying a little more for the advantages of the Samsung netbook.

A netbook will not replace my IBM notebook but often the small size makes it far more convenient to use. A netbook cannot do everything a quality notebook will do. For example, I can’t do video editing on the netbook as there is no firewire input. Some of the notebooks at my home have firewire and some do not, but I have a PCMCIA card to provide firewire to those which lack it. The netbook doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot either. Nor does it have a parallel or serial port, or even a built in DVD writer. Fortunately I got mine with a deal which included a free external DVD writer, but actually I rarely even use it now that most software is sold by downloading as opposed to physical copies. It does include three USB ports, a memory card reader,  WiFi, and Bluetooth.

I wouldn’t try to do heavy duty work when I have several windows open or need to see a lot on the screen, but for what they are designed to do the netbook works great. When traveling it handles everything I need on the road, along with being much smaller and lighter. The small size makes it much easier to use on an airplane. Generally I don’t even try to pull out my large notebook while flying. I also feel better about risking wear and tear on an inexpensive netbook while traveling as opposed to a notebook which costs several times as much.

The Samsung models cost about a $100 more than the cheaper ones out there but it is well worth it. While you have to struggle with some netbook keyboards, the Samsung has a keyboard that is 97% of a full keyboard and I don’t mind using it at all. Another advantage of the Samsung is battery life. My battery seems to last about six hours without resorting to drastic battery saving. I can’t say for sure because it has never out on me–which I cannot say about my notebook. I figure that having to carry around a power cord defeats the purpose of a small netbook.

It is even nice around the house to be able to quickly pick it up, restore from hibernation to Windows, and get on line. In this day and age a netbook serves the old functions of picking up a newspaper or magazine. On the weekends I put the netbook on my nightstand, allowing me to check email and the morning newspaper before even getting out of bed.  I also frequently do this with my Palm but the netbook is far superior.

My N120 doesn’t even set the record for batter life. It came down to a choice between this model and one with a longer batter life. I went with the N120 due to better sound. I figured that its battery life is good enough, but the sound comes in handy while traveling should we want to watch movies or television shows without ear phones. The 160 GB hard drive leaves plenty of room for lots of DivX and MKV video files. I also pick up my home television which is connected to a Slingbox (another “essential” gadget).

The one downside is the screen but this is an obvious cost of a small sized computer. The resolution is only 1024 x 600, and there is a program included to stretch it out to 1024 x 768 when necessary. This hardly competes with my notebook’s 1600 x 1200, but the point is to add on a netbook for when a small computer is sufficient, not to try to replace other computers. From all the reviews I’ve read the Samsung sounded like the best, making it well worth spending an extra $100 with Asus also producing ones which sound almost as good. But buying a Dell, as the reviewer at The Wall Street Journal did, and I’m not surprised that she felt a combination of love and hate.

12 Comments

  1. 1
    Christoher Skyi says:

    One of the best PC-based laptops for writers in is the IMB ThinkPad (get the largest screen you can and max out the memory because you’ll be running (yuck!) Vista).  Ignore Vista, which I guess isn’t that bad, and the ThinkPad is great!

  2. 2
    Ron Chusid says:

    I use an older Thinkpad which still has XP, but both this and the netbook both have different uses. There are a lot of things I do with the Thinkpad I wouldn’t consider on the netbook, but many times the tiny netbook really comes in handy.

    The last I looked at Thinkpads IBM/Lenovo was still selling some with both Vista and XP.

  3. 3
    Christoher Skyi says:

    If you can get it with XP, do so.  Vista is more a ball and chain than an efficient op. system.  Later, if MS get’s it’s act together and develops an op. sys. equal that running macs, you can always upgrade. XP was the last smart think XP did.

  4. 4
    Brian Meunier says:

    Loving The Right Type of Netbook – Liberal Values – Defending … http://bit.ly/tAYsB

  5. 5
    techtroniks says:

    Loving The Right Type of Netbook – Liberal Values – Defending … http://bit.ly/tAYsB

  6. 6
    Chris (kiwi) Gray says:

    Loving The Right Type of Netbook – Liberal Values – Defending …: The tech section of The Wall Street Journal h.. http://tinyurl.com/nfpgj7

  7. 7
    eketahuna 2 says:

    Loving The Right Type of Netbook – Liberal Values – Defending …: The tech section of The Wall Street Journal h.. http://tinyurl.com/nfpgj7

  8. 8
    Jesmi says:

    I recently got my NC10. I love it! It was easy to upgrade, and it’s great for checking email, and portable writing. The keyboard was the real selling attribute for me; I use the left shift key.

  9. 9
    Ron Chusid says:

    It was the NC10 which first established Samsung as having the top netbooks, with newer models following.

    For whatever it is worth, reading user comments from the few people who have both did note a slight advantage for the NC10–the screen is viewable at greater angles. When watching with my wife in a hotel room I did have to play around with it a little, but did find an angle where it was clear for both of us. On the other hand the N120 has better speakers (which so far hasn’t mattered as we have used ear buds with a y-connector when watching movies so far, but if it was just the two of us in the room we would have used the speakers).

    When researching the netbook I quickly concluded that I should buy one of the Samsung models. The harder question was which one.

    Now I wish companies would put out  bags which carry the netbook (with protection), an SLR, and some other electronics. I have a huge backpack which carries my notebook , SLR, and other stuff but I would like to change to something smaller. The only bag I found so far which does this was pretty expensive so at this point I have stuck with putting the netbook into my larger bag. I figure as netbooks continue to sell the choices in such cases will also increase.

  10. 10
    Gerry- Small Laptop Computers says:

    Great post which highlights the need to understand the different uses and capabilities of a netbook versus a full size notebooks.  Too many marketers are implying that a netbook is just a smaller notebook which causes dissatisfaction. As far as DELL and the love -hate relationship, who doesn’t to some extent have the same relationship with any product?

  11. 11
    Ron Chusid says:

    Relating the hate aspect to Dell comes from a previous post where the discussion included problems with Dell.

  12. 12
    Fritz says:

    A great deal of the pain w Vista (full disclosure — I work for MSFT and know the guts pretty well) was that device driver support was thin.  Especially for laptops.
     
    Some serious plumbing changes in Vista (and Win7 — which is really nice, BTW) make it much easier to get things done as a non-administrator (this is hard in XP and much harder in earlier OSes).  I urge people in the strongest possible terms to have an administrator account that they *only* use for software installation.  Then do everything else using one or more standard user accounts.  If you wind up wanting to install software, you should get a prompt asking you to enter your administrator password.  If you don’t know why you are seeing that prompt, PLEASE do NOT enter your password — something is likely trying to hack you.

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