starting a PGCE in Sep. Which netbook?

WinterGhosts

Hi!

I'm due to start a PGCE in September and my birthday is next month so my parents would like to buy me a netbook. I already have a mac at present which never causes me any problems unlike a netbook my mum had a year or two ago which was terrible to use.

I think the budget will be around £200 however this could probably be raised slightly.

I want a reasonably large hard drive as although i will have an external one and a couple 2gb memory sticks, I would prefer to have the majority of uni work/planning work stored on the netbook for easy access.

I'm used to decent speed with my mac and I know that netbooks are not really powerful but I don't want one that is going to cause me grief by not being able to cope with running two programs at one.

I will mainly be using word/publisher etc but I may want to run flash websites/youtube so it needs to cope with that.

I also would like a decent sized keyboard but not to sacrifice the weight. I will be carrying a lot of heavy things around so netbook preferably light as poss.

I think I'm probably asking too much here but you never know until you ask. I don't know much about netbooks so hopefully someone can give me some pointers.

Oh I also know that there are a lot of new netbooks coming out, are these worth waiting for. (i like all the touch screen capabilities :rotfl:)

Thanks ever so much!

dixiebb

Dual-Core Acer Aspire One D255

^^ this one is quite nice and the dual-core will assist with Flash and watching youtube videos .

WinterGhosts

Just had a quick look on amazon and it sounds pretty good. Looks like it should do everything I would want it to. Someone on there suggests upgrading to a 2GB ram (not sure how I would do that....) to get extra out of it. Battery life is also better than I would have hoped for - always a plus!

esuhl

I'm very happy with my Asus EEE 901, although it has one of the older single core Atom CPUs. The EEE-specific version of Xandros it came with was really buggy and Windows XP didn't perform that quickly, but I installed Arch Linux and it's really quite nippy. I can get about 7hrs battery life out of it, which is amazing, and it's small and light enough that I don't have to think twice about lugging it about with me.

If speed is important, a 2GB upgrade (and a dual-core chip) will definitely help. You can upgrade the RAM on most netbooks that I've seen by just removing a panel on the underside and inserting the new RAM module - it's pretty straightforward.

macman

Netbooks are designed for one thing-portability. No optical drive, tiny screen, cramped keyboard, low powered processor to extend battery life.
So unless you need that portability, in almost every respect a netbook is inferior to a conventional laptop.
For example, expecting a decent sized keyboard on a machine with a 10" screen is not realistic.
As long as you're OK with that, fine.
If you already have a Macbook, why can't you use that as your portable device?

WinterGhosts

macman: I have a desktop. This is fine for working off at home but I will need something portable to take to lectures and school placements. I'm not considering laptops because they are fairly heavy which I don't want on top of textbooks, marking and paperwork etc. (a lot of this)

I understand I won't get the same size keyboard as a laptop, however my sister and mum have had two different netbooks and the quality between the two keyboards was significant enough for me to have chosen one over the other without considering other details.

However, both of these netbooks are around 2 +years old so I was looking for advice on slightly newer ones.

esuhl: Thank you. I also didn't realise it was that simple to upgrade ram!