Atom power consumption

almillar

luci - usually, but not absolutely always, on a laptop or netbook, the processor is soldered on, so you'd be looking at replacing the entire motherboard.

luci

Thanks both.

Any suggestions for a netbook with a faster processor and long battery life?

Johnmcl7

Depending on the model it may be worth considering an SSD instead of a hard drive if it's a standard drive it takes, at worst if you moved on you could take the drive into another machine.

As for recommendations for a new netbook, this class of machine is pretty much at an end now as tablets have killed them off. It depends on your budget and size requirements as to what would be a suitable replacement.

John

luci

Thanks again.

Budget up to £300 and no bigger than 10-11"

ETA - I don't want Windows 8.

The Toshiba is an NB200. What is a SSD, what is the rough cost and would I need a pc shop to replace it?

I upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB, but that is the extent of my hardware techie knowledge.

Johnmcl7

I would reconsider your choice of Windows 8 as it's a much better operating system for low end hardware particularly Atom processors where it's surprisingly quick and responsive. It does appear quite different initially but the desktop mode is near identical to Windows 7 and there's third party addins if you want to customise it further to behave like Windows 7. I wouldn't want to buy an Atom-class system with Windows 7 particularly as many of them come with the starter edition which has some very irritating restrictions.

An SSD is a solid-state drive which is an alternative to a hard drive, it consists of flash memory chips instead of a spinning disk platter so speeds are substantially quicker than a conventional hard drive. The tradeoff for the speed is that the cost per GB is far higher so a 128GB SSD is around £80 although there are some a bit cheaper.

The difficulty in swapping the drive over depends on the design of the machine, some make the drives quite accessible similar to ram so it's just a couple of screws to slide the drive out and then slide the new drive in. Netbooks can be a bit fiddly getting the operating system back on without an optical drive, if your system offers the option to make a recovery CD with an external burner that's probably the easiest way.

Looking up the spec of your laptop, it's a bit older than I was thinking and you're still stuck with a sow processor so it's probably not worth the money and instead better putting it towards a new machine.

John

luci

Thanks.

The netbook has been behaving a lot better the past couple of days since I posted so I will persevere. I just wish I knew what causes it to become so slow as it be almost unusable at times, then it will spring back to life a couple of days later.