Netbooks – anybody using one?

I’ve been considering a move to a netbook when my lappy gives up the ghost. Is anybody using one at the moment? If so how are you finding it? Do you miss an optical drive, and how do you find dealing with a 10″ screen?

90% of the time I’m on my current one is browsing on the sofa with it on my lap and a bit of iTunes or Spotify, so I’m thinking netbook would be bang on

Got one at home, it’s excellent for that 90% of the time you’re not really doing anything serious.

I don’t really miss the optical drive, but then I don’t really watch many films.

Acer aspire one (I think its around 9″ of screen).

My proper laptop failed and I bought this as a cheap quick carry around while it was being repaired. Its been great! I expected slow, I got fast.

I run AVG antivirus on it as McCaffee that it comes with seems to cause hesitation. I am pleased how fast the netbook is generally. I have even run photoshop CS1 batch jobs on it. CS2 wont work due to Adobe programming in some screen size restriction.

You can get bigger batteries from Amzon to make it run 6 hours plus without mains connection, I have found mine to be sucessful.

I find it handy to use close up and its great for proping on your chest lying down to watch films etc (I have an external drive) I am experimenting with copying films to the hard drive or large memory sticks. Its screen is harder to see on a table than a normal laptop, but there are other compensations and also, you can plug them into a freestanding monitor if you need a big picture.

The best way of describing it is ‘cuddly’ as you put it places and take it places its just too difficult to use a full size laptop in. I know 2 other people with netbooks and they both think they are great too.

If you manage to get one from John Lewis, there is a 2 year free warrentee on most of thier machines.

I’m just waiting for my Aspire One to arrive, really interested in the battery from Amazon, is it external and how much was it?

sammy nc10 (keeps the wife off my toys)

Looked at this last month for Ms midlife, decided Samsung NC10 would be best because of hard drive, Windows XP, keyboard size and 7hr+ battery, but have delayed buying as we’ve been on holiday for a fortnight and N110 should be out this week with nearly same spec, glossy screen and 9hr battery.

Intersting, it was the NC10 I was looking at. From John Lewis too!

I recently got a Lenovo s10e and am very happy with it for the price. Yes, the screen is quite small and some websites and programs do not work brilliantly (e.g. if looking at photo’s of cars on auto-trader in the pop-up dialog, some don’t have a scroll bar and the buttons are off the bottom of the screen so you have to move the window as high as it will go or zoom out to reach the buttons), but for what I need at home and the price, I can’t fault it.
£250 got me a 1.6ghz, 160gb hard disk and an upgrade to 2gb of memory, plus Windows XP. Battery will run for 2.5 hours on the 3cell it came with. Can get a 6cell battery if needed to. The hard disk is also fairly standard so I can upgrade/replace in future if need be.
Wireless and bluetooth, x2 usb.

Just taking a while to get used to a different layout of keys on the keyboard.

As I said, for what I need a computer at home for, it does it all.

Luckily I already had an external DVD writer so that was not an issue.

NC10 is rated by many as the best buy at the moment. Should be a new one out very soon.

I’ve been tempted to get one but I’d miss the “power” and features of a full laptop tbh.

I’ve been really tempted by this…

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158885

If only someone would buy my desktop, screen and printer *hint hint*

I went the other way had a 12″ ibook and went to a 15″ and find it a lot more practical.

Missus has got a NC10, I really like it. Decent keyboard, screen is decent size. Decent for surfing and general work. Never really missed the hard drive, run USB drive most of the time.

I’ve an NC10 ( that’s what i’m on now) and to be honest I couldn’t ask for more.
I was toying witht eh ‘what’s the most powerful and greatest machine ever’, but then realised I wouldn’t ‘need’ any of the higher power functions.

The NC10 comes with XP, onto which i’ve loaded lots of programmes including office 2007. They all run flawlessly. I’m sure video editing stuff wouldn’t work, but that doesn’t concern me.

What’s great is it really is very portable. I can easily carry it in one hand with a bunch of papers, and run presentations etc. from it easily.

Videos run fine too – either from the HDD or streaming from net, or streaming across home network from DVD drive on other pooter.

That’s it really – they work very well as a ‘second/portable’ PC.

DrP