Can anyone give me some advice on netbooks?

asininity

Its more worth looking at Acer. LaptopsDirect/AcerDirect websites are good. Acer are definitely cheap and they do good laptops.

Strider590

My father likes netbooks too, one of his friends has one and he raves about how easy it is to manage photos on a netbook! which is great, but he's useless with a PC and all the explaining in the world won't convince him that a netbook is just a very small PC thats harder to use.

totalsolutions

1) Read PcPro as suggested
2) Samsung NC20 is good
3) Get H to look at Netbooks, then buy it.

dj9928

WOW so many netbook haters, I love my Acer AOA 150Bb, I have a desktop but it hasn't been on in months, I use this little beauty, It handles my work processing, photos, and music fine, I love it., It even fits in the glove pocket of the car, Excellent

JasonTheKnight

Another vote for the NC10 here - it's a little beauty and better than many (in fact all) "proper" laptops that I've had.

Leopard

Most people rate the Samsung NC10 highly but, personally, I greatly prefer the 10" MSI Wind with a 6-cell battery.

The Samsung has a glossy screen and it's like looking into a darkened mirror: you get reflections from every light source behind you. It's very distracting.

The Wind has a matte screen, which makes it much more practical for a device that (by its very nature) you carry around with you and use in different locations - in most of which you cannot alter the lighting.

A clone of the 10" Wind is called the Advent 4211. The latter is now discontinued but it's being remaindered and can be picked up with a useful discount at DSG stores and others for about £225 (with a 3-cell battery).

The Wind has an extremely nice keyboard, too. I love mine and would certainly replace it with another Wind 100 rather than a Samsung NC10 if anything untoward happened to it.

Any netbook with a display of less than 10" is impractical unless you have extremely acute eyesight and tiny fingers. That, however, makes them good for small children.

The other thing that people seem to forget is that many netbooks, including the Wind and the Samsung NC10 (or NC110, now) can support an external monitor. I attach a 19" (matte!) Samsung monitor to mine when it's on my desk at home and the two screens can be run in extended desktop mode, giving a useful amount of display.

It's worth adding another 1 GB of RAM, giving it 2 MB in total. That's simple and inexpensive to do. I also upgraded the wi-fi card in mine to 802.11n at the same time.

You can run a Wind on Mac OS X. Indeed, like many netbooks, a Wind runs better and faster on Mac OS X than it does on its native Windows XP. But to do this is an infringement of Apple's EULA for Mac OS X, so technically it isn't legal. But nor is unlocking an iPhone. Apple seems fairly relaxed about both practices, though - at least for consumers.

asininity

The netbooks run very good under linux if its done properly by the manufacturer. I have ubuntu running on mine (lenovo) and its very fast.