Netbook for School

Terrysdelight

Hi


I need to replace my son's netbook for school. In short, my son uses a netbook for all his written work. He doesn't use it for surfing. School would provide a netbook but he has to sign it in and out every day - then sign it back in when he's got PE etc - so it makes sense for me to provide him with one.


I want one with a good battery life - is anyone able to recommend a good product through experience?


Many thanks
Terrysdelight

Fightsback

What's the budget and required screen size ?

Terrysdelight

Maybe about £250. He's currently looking at 11 inch. I'm happy for him to have a bigger screen but not to go up to full laptop size as it needs to fit into his rucksack.

cookie365

Would a Chromebook suit him? Plenty of good ones available at that price.

Fightsback

In that range (ca £250) or below a lot of the netbooks have a celeron N2840 CPU which is truly awful. It would be worth adding a few extra pounds and going for a pentium class processor or above. Avoid AMD A4 1200U it's even worse than the celeron also avoid the Intel Atom Z3735 as they are slow too. For example see here:

£280 - Acer TravelMate B115 Quad Core 4GB 500GB 11.6 inch Windows 8.1 Laptop

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_B115-M_PQCN3520_4-500__W8.1_NX.VA1EK.002/version.asp

This has a Pentium N3520 which is roughly twice as fast a CPU than the Celeron N2840.


Anyone else care to throw something into the mix ?

boatman

http://www.tesco.com/direct/asus-x205ta-116-eeebook-intel-atom-2gb-ram-32gb-ssd-with-office-black/483-0245.prd
Another option.

Terrysdelight

Fightsback wrote: »

In that range (ca £250) or below a lot of the netbooks have a celeron N2840 CPU which is truly awful. It would be worth adding a few extra pounds and going for a pentium class processor or above. Avoid AMD A4 1200U it's even worse than the celeron. For example see here:

£280 - Acer TravelMate B115 Quad Core 4GB 500GB 11.6 inch Windows 8.1 Laptop

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_B115-M_PQCN3520_4-500__W8.1_NX.VA1EK.002/version.asp

This has a Pentium N3520 which is roughly twice as fast a CPU than the Celeron N2840.

Anyone else care to throw something into the mix ?

OK. I think my son's old netbook was really slow. I will up the budget.

Terrysdelight

I want to make sure I buy a better product than the previous. How do I tell the processor speed etc?

Many thanks

jaydeeuk1

Fightsback wrote: »

In that range (ca £250) or below a lot of the netbooks have a celeron N2840 CPU which is truly awful. It would be worth adding a few extra pounds and going for a pentium class processor or above. Avoid AMD A4 1200U it's even worse than the celeron also avoid the Intel Atom Z3735 as they are slow too. For example see here:

£280 - Acer TravelMate B115 Quad Core 4GB 500GB 11.6 inch Windows 8.1 Laptop

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_B115-M_PQCN3520_4-500__W8.1_NX.VA1EK.002/version.asp

This has a Pentium N3520 which is roughly twice as fast a CPU than the Celeron N2840.


Anyone else care to throw something into the mix ?

!!!!!! are you on?


Bay trail atoms are plenty powerful enough for homework, office etc. I use my asus t100 as a demo machine running IIS, SQL Server and the odd bit of photoshop and dreamweaver. Other benefit is 9-10hr battery life. It feels no slower than my surface pro in use.


Plus the n3520 you recommended is pretty much a bay trail atom underneath, just higher clock and better memory bandwidth - they're all silvermont based. Theres hardly any difference in performance in general use between the bay trail atom, celerons and pentiums, in fact the mechanical drive in your link will probably feel less responsive than an mmc in the bay trail atoms during boot up. If you want a performance boost you need to look at the more expensive haswell based pentiums which appear in 11-13" formats, but you won't find that for £250.

Fightsback

jaydeeuk1 wrote: »

!!!!!! are you on?


Bay trail atoms are plenty powerful enough for homework, office etc. I use my asus t100 as a demo machine running IIS, SQL Server and the odd bit of photoshop and dreamweaver. Other benefit is 9-10hr battery life. It feels no slower than my surface pro in use.


Plus the n3520 you recommended is pretty much a bay trail atom underneath, just higher clock and better memory bandwidth - they're all silvermont based. Theres hardly any difference in performance in general use between the bay trail atom, celerons and pentiums, in fact the mechanical drive in your link will probably feel less responsive than an mmc in the bay trail atoms during boot up. If you want a performance boost you need to look at the more expensive haswell based pentiums which appear in 11-13" formats, but you won't find that for £250.

Hang on there.

1 ) 32gb emmc is going to get blasted by a school kid in a week and you will have nowhere near 32gb after windows, recovery partition and bloatware. Besides you have the option of swapping out the 500gb HDD for an SSD and pocketing the HDD as a back up drive.

2) A lot of stuff is board soldered 2gb single channel RAM in that bracket and additionally the atom is single channel only where the pentium is dual channel, the acer will take 2 x 4gb

3 ) Not all bay trails are created equal. Take the Intel Atom Z3735F quoted by the poster earlier:

http://www.tesco.com/direct/asus-x205ta-116-eeebook-intel-atom-2gb-ram-32gb-ssd-with-office-black/483-0245.prd

It benchmarks at 1/2 the amount of The pentium I mentioned earlier.

Atom

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+Z3735F+%40+1.33GHz

900

Pentium

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+N3520+%40+2.16GHz

1852

Celeron N2840 (technically a chopped in half pentium)

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+N2840+%40+2.16GHz :

1025

4 ) Pshop on a atom, you cannot be serious ! Yeah fine for tweaking the odd mid/low res pictures of cats but forget more demanding processing (RAW ?) unless you enjoy baking cakes. A masochist uses pshop on anything less that 22inches.

Granted a haswell would be ideal and if they can look hard enough a refurb 13inch i5 in the £350 mark could be found. I picked up a Grade A refurb HP g1 430 i5 up last year for £350. As sky lake is coming later this year and 5th gens hitting the market already expect some stock dumps over the summer so may be it''s worth hanging on a bit.

mchale

http://www.trustedreviews.com/hp-stream-11-review