What can I do with a a netbook? (netbook newbie)

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Slider19

Gawd
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Jun 25, 2002
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Recently, my primary computer broke down and I realized i have no backup at home (have a regular laptop at work, but I don't bring it home).

So, I'm looking for a netbook as a backup computer or for travel needs other than work (or maybe even for work).

The netbook should have good battery life - what is good battery life for a netbook?
It should be able to run WinXP, Office 2007, Firefox (or Chrome, Opera) and be able to open open 30mb Excel files with pivot tables, lookup tables and some complex formulas. Streaming video from the internet like hulu or youtube HD should also be possible. It should be able to connect to an ethernet port or use wifi. A USB 2.0 port would also be useful as well as DVD-ROM (unless I can stall software some other way).

How much of this is actually possible?

I will explore the rest of the forum to, but I need some basic starting points on what exactly a netbook is and what it can do (and can't do).
 
And I don't necessarily want to stick to just a netbook. Basically anything cheap (<$350) and light that can do the above would be perfect.

Thoughts welcome.
 
youtube HD and Hulu stutters on most current netbooks.
XP comes one most of them right now.
Netbooks don't have optical drives, so they have to be external.
most software should be able to be copied to a USB thumbdrive and installed, or installed through a network.
 
Hmm, that kinda sucks. What about youtube on regualr HQ and hulu on 360p settings? Still bad?

The USB or network install only kinda sucks for me. Any good really light notebooks on the market that are affordable?

For those who own netbooks, how are they in general as a backup or travel computer?
 
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The gateway lt with the amd cpu seems to play youtube hd and hulu pretty well. It can also play older games from the half life 2 gen and earlier pretty well.

I'm looking into the gateway LT3103u and the more powerful msi wind u210.

The wind cpu is 400mhz faster and seems to have 2 memory slots vs 1. Many users have gotten the cpu on the lt3103u cpu up to 1.4ghz from 1.2ghz and notice alot better playback of files so I'm thinking that the 1.6ghz cpu will easily run the stuff. They have about a $50 diffrence. Also alot of people say that win 7 64bit runs much better than vista on the system and clears up performance issues.

They really are the most powerful netbooks out right now under $400
 
I would say that getting a Netbook with a DVD-ROM drive is damn near impossible, mostly because of the fact that they are netbooks and part of their definition is not having a disk drive. The HD playback on YouTube is maybe possible on the new ION based netbooks, but even then its dodgy. All netbooks typically are very light (IE less than 4 lbs).

Your best option for the best battery life would be the ASUS 1005ha with the 8 cell battery which gets around 8-9 hours on battery with moderate usage (what you described).

All netbooks come standard with WiFi, some of them come with mobile broadband options (of course with monthly costs) I think most of them have at least 2 USB ports some of them have up to 4.

So to answer your question most of it is possible with the exception of the YouTube HD and the DVD drive.

The way to get around the DVD drive absence anyway is to download most of your software (which is mostly possible now a days) or get an external DVD drive. Or make an image of your software on your current PC and then copy that over to the netbook using a flash drive or external hard drive and use the serials and what not that came with your respective software.

EDIT: Just saw your post about really light notebooks for cheap and short answer to that is if you want to spend well over $600. I know that Dell makes some smaller notebooks that weigh around 5 lbs and arent that expensive, but then again they are Dell so if that is a risk you are willing to take, then take a look at them.
 
im getting a netbook soon. my problem is a i have a projector for my htpc/main computer. it works great, but i cant leave the projector on all day unless i want to buy new bulbs every 6 months.

so im going to get a 40" or so LCD tv to use during the day- but that screws me for web browsing and such.

SO, finally, i will get a netbook to use on my couch while i watch tv on my LCD tv. web browsing will be about its only use- but i like to quickly jump online and check stuff a few times a day... so theyre perfect for me.
 
Yeah, the light laptop option is too expensive, I will likely go for some of the more powerful netbooks and install software through my external HDD. I don't really need HD video from youtube when on the netbook, but was just wondering.

Thanks
 
Slider19 said:
Yeah, the light laptop option is too expensive, I will likely go for some of the more powerful netbooks and install software through my external HDD. I don't really need HD video from youtube when on the netbook, but was just wondering.

Thanks
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you can look at the hp dv2 . its $650 and comes with a amd neo 1.6ghz chip with 4 gigs of ram and a radeon 3450 with 512 megs of ram. It should have no problems playing modern games at lower res and watching youtube and other stuff
 
Yeah, I've been doing a lot of research for a more "mobile" experience with a laptop. My Mom has a Dell Mini 10 that I just installed Windows 7 on. Runs fine, if your only doing one task at a time. Just watching normal youtube taxed the CPU to 90%.

I would say the Netbooks minus the Gateway and the Asus with the Nvidia Ion GPU, they're really not meant for much more then web, e-mail, light Word usuage. The keyboard on them makes long typing sessions horrible. But I hear the Asus EEE line has better keyboards. The Gateway though I hear has "heating" problems and a short battery life considering its a nebook. I see mixed reviews all over the place on most of these. People with the ASUS 1000HA, with the Atom N280, have better luck with streaming with youtube and Hulu.

The DV2 looks very appealing, but I still don't know. I might be getting the info crossed in my mind between the HP DV2 and Gateway. I trust Gateway, since Acer has been having a good standard lately. I still don't know if I could trust an HP yet though.
 
From what i can tell the gateway gets you between 4-5 hours and some have fixed the cool n quiet issue and now properly lowers the voltage when at 800mhz
 
the gateway is a great deal as compared with other netbook options. $350 cdn for 11.6" now for amd. The EEE 1000HA line appears to be the good option to go with too.
 
I own a LT-3103u. It has the HyperX cas3 2 GB stick and 500 GB 7200.4 drive running Win7. At stock speed heavy browsing of the boards, ebay, amazon and the like I get 4 hours with the screen at 70%. With RMClock power on demand set at 0.650/800 - 0.800/1200 and screen at 70% I get a real 5 hours plus of the same usage.
 
I just wanted to add that the 3103 would be about $430Cdn, has 6cel and the other specs mentioned by tanware. Is it worth the $70 extra, for 6cel, 2gb memory, and a bigger hdd?
 
pasta4u said:
The gateway lt with the amd cpu seems to play youtube hd and hulu pretty well. It can also play older games from the half life 2 gen and earlier pretty well.

I'm looking into the gateway LT3103u and the more powerful msi wind u210.

The wind cpu is 400mhz faster and seems to have 2 memory slots vs 1. Many users have gotten the cpu on the lt3103u cpu up to 1.4ghz from 1.2ghz and notice alot better playback of files so I'm thinking that the 1.6ghz cpu will easily run the stuff. They have about a $50 diffrence. Also alot of people say that win 7 64bit runs much better than vista on the system and clears up performance issues.

They really are the most powerful netbooks out right now under $400
Click to expand...

I'm running the LT3103 at 1.4ghz and HD youtube is still very choppy. Hulu is watchable but there are certainly dropped frames. Kind of a disappointment, but they certainly are the most capable netbooks out.
 
I've got an Asus Eee 1000HE... really good in the battery department (i average about 8 hours with normal 802.11n usage and about 5.5 hours if I'm running Geneious really hard).

Got it for $300 off these forums w/ upgraded ram (2gb), next step is to throw in an SSD and she'll be all set.

It does everything I need to right at about 3lbs. and lets me keep the XPS monster at home (1 mile uphill hike to class every day)
 
The Asus 1005HA seems like one of the best deals right now. I've heard for people playing WoW on the lowest settings at around 14-20fps in unpopulated areas, to give you an idea. Also ran Planescape on mine(I think that's a pretty good type of game to put on them).

Anyway, if you don't want to worry about HD video you could get an Asus N10 netbook that has an nVidia 9300M card in it.

I haven't had too much of an issue playing high resolution video though. I use VLC and Media Player Classic. VLC would start to stutter or mess up the image when I played 1280x720 videos in .mkv format. I just switched to Media Player Classic for those and it worked fine. If flash videos don't play I can always download them with DownloadHelper in Firefox and watch them with MPC or VLC, so that's not really and issue for me. I kinda prefer it that way anyway.

Btw, I use an acer aspire one w/ a 2.6ghz atom, HDD, 1GB RAM, and Windows XP. I'd recommend installing 2GB of RAM. I haven't really needed it for this netbook, but I'm pretty sure it'd smooth out the tiny slowdowns I sometimes get(I like to keep a million tabs open in Firefox).


[Edit:] Also, I dislike the glossy screens on most newer netbooks. If you get the Asus 1005HA it'll have a glossy screen, but the 1005HA-M has a matte screen(a little bit worse battery life and some other differences too)
 
You may want to look at the wind u210. Its $430 usd on amazon and newegg.

Its the same as the gateway except the cpu is running at 1.6ghz and it has dual channel ram so you can put up to 8 gigs 4x4. Should be much faster than the gateway. Dunno why there are no reviews yet thou
 
I haven't read the entire thread buuut....

You can install software over a network by setting the CD/DVD drive on your desktop to shared... Latest netbook models can get anywhere from 5-8 hours of battery life with the 6-cell batteries, one of the nicest things about netbooks... You're not gonna be able to play any streaming HD content whatsoever on a netbook tho, Flash is just too poorly optimized. SD streams play fine tho (360p or w/e is the standard def for Hulu), even with a few things open in the background.

For everything else the OP mentioned a netbook should be fine tho for editing large spreadsheets I'd try and look at some of the newer 12" 1336x768 models rather than the 10" 1024x600 models... Only downside is that because of Intel/MS machinations many of the larger-screen models are hobbled w/slightly slower versions of the Atom, not all tho.

Edit: Win7 runs beautifully on them btw, even with 1GB (tho a lil' bit more helps if you multi-task a ton)... And I've loved my netbook so far. I have an early 8.9" Acer Aspire One and I've used it for a ton of things, including a lot of travel, and browsing from the couch, and watching Hulu (SD) on my HDTV, and even some video encoding in a pinch (yeah it's slow, but fairly capable of doing it). I was a lil' wary of the Acer name but this was one of the better rated models back in November (and one of the few w/a 6-cell battery at an affordable price then).

It's worked out great tho. I'd probably buy another one from 'em if I was in a hurry and didn't have time to do a lot of research... Didn't come with a lot of crapware either. I think some newer Samsung/Toshiba models are the current battery life kings tho. The ASUS 1000HX line is always popular too, and well priced (as is Acer, they're the most competitive in that regard). Frankly, besides battery life the only big points of distinctions amongst them are gonna be the screen, keyboard, and touchpad (and if you use tap to click the latter doesn't matter much imo).

They're all using the same Atom proc, same HDDs, same amount of memory, etc.
 
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pasta4u said:
From what i can tell the gateway gets you between 4-5 hours and some have fixed the cool n quiet issue and now properly lowers the voltage when at 800mhz
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My AAO has done that ever since I got it last Nov... And there's plenty of models out there with much better battery life.

As far as the keyboards... It's personal preference, frankly I don't have much trouble typing on mine for a couple of hours. I think layout plays as much a role in that as size does... I loooove the Acer/Samsung layouts with the properly placed right Shift keys and the discrete Page Up/Down keys by the arrow keys, it's a very overlooked detail on a system with such a small screen, beats the heck out of reaching for Fn+Up/Down all the time.

Gaming... Well, don't expect miracles, obviously. Stick to older or simpler games and they're quite capable tho. Think World of Goo, Starcraft, other RTS/turn-based games, or even a good emulator (ZSNES) with a bunch of old console games. There's a cute foldable mini-gamepad by Genius (it's on Amazon) that goes great with these, it's the size of a woman's makeup thingamajig when you close it, $20.

Oh and installing stuff on them over the network is a breeze... MS Office took all of 15 min. for me, tho I did hook it up over Ethernet rather than using the wireless. Other than that, and Norton Ghost, I haven't really needed to install anything off CDs tho.
 
Belgain Roffles said:
The 9300m wouldn't help with youtube or hulu though.
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Correct, Flash has pretty much no GPU acceleration so it's pointless... Unless you intend to use the netbook as some sort of pseudo-portable-HTPC and you wanna play 1080p content, the NVidia Ion models are kind of a wash. I mean, you can even play 720p content (with the right codec/player/rip) off the integrated Intel graphics otherwise, and DVD rips play fine using whatever you want obviously.
 
Impulse said:
Correct, Flash has pretty much no GPU acceleration so it's pointless... Unless you intend to use the netbook as some sort of pseudo-portable-HTPC and you wanna play 1080p content, the NVidia Ion models are kind of a wash. I mean, you can even play 720p content (with the right codec/player/rip) off the integrated Intel graphics otherwise, and DVD rips play fine using whatever you want obviously.
Click to expand...

You have to also remember when on youtube or hulu etc you are using the wifi. The wifi encryption/decryption uses up available cpu cycles as well. The higher the res the more bandwidth and the more cpu cycles to the wifi. Don't belive it, pause the video and watch the progressive buffer speed increase...............
 
Impulse said:
Correct, Flash has pretty much no GPU acceleration so it's pointless... Unless you intend to use the netbook as some sort of pseudo-portable-HTPC and you wanna play 1080p content, the NVidia Ion models are kind of a wash. I mean, you can even play 720p content (with the right codec/player/rip) off the integrated Intel graphics otherwise, and DVD rips play fine using whatever you want obviously.
Click to expand...

Ah, my bad on that advice. I was wondering why people were having such issues with HD Youtube when I could play downloaded files of high resolutions just fine. Like I mentioned earlier, I don't really watch a lot of streaming media so I guess that's why I haven't really noticed the issue.
 
Most streamed (Flash) media tends to hog a lot of CPU cycles (and like I said, it's not accelerated by the GPU at all, unlike ripped HD content), some of the single-core Intel CULV processors can't handle it very well either (and those are based on the C2D, not the Atom).

As you said tho, it's debatable how many people really wanna use their netbook to view that kinda content. Unless you've hooked it up to an HDTV there's not much of a point, even on a higher res 12" screen it's not gonna look that much better than 360p/480p stuff.
 
i think were just in a weird point of the changing tech right now. pc makers are clearly favoring slower cpu's for media-accelerating onboard video. its a cheaper route to go, and gives you the ability to play newer games. i think the fact that streaming youtube in high def being about the only real problem is just because the hardware hasnt adapted fully yet., we will likely see DXVA accelerated streaming somehow soon....
 
Soon as Adobe gets off it's ass anyway... They seem to move almost as slow as Apple when it comes to updates of this sort (still waiting for the Bluetooth profile on my iPod touch to allow skipping and repeat kkthx!).
 
In addition to the Gateway and MSI models mentioned in this thread, I'd like to point out the 11.6" LED-backlit Acer 1810T.

- 1.4 Ghz core2 solo ULV
- $440'ish (can be had for less with Bing cashback or other deals)

I'm guessing it has longer battery life than the AMD NEO options. It uses the integrated 4500-series video though.

I'm currently looking at this sector of netbook/notebook crossovers... ultra-portables? Whatever they are... The Acer is the best I've come across (for my father = no gaming) after 1 hour of searching.
 
I like the Acer 1810T (called 1410 over here in the States). I just sold my Dell Mini 9 netbook, because it was too small for my hands and cramped my wrists. I'm looking at getting one of the 11" CULV models, and it's most likely going to be the Acer 1410. Amazon has them for around $437, and there are coupons for other places floating around.

And, the Acer 1410/1810T has 2 RAM slots, for a max of 4GB of RAM (and that Core2 Solo SU3500 chip in it is 64-bit as well). It also comes with Vista Home Premium which is good for a free Win7 upgrade. (Doesn't matter much to me, since I got Win7 Pro through MSDNAA; I'm a legit grad student.).
 
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