Netbooks - a short overview
You may or may not have heard of netbooks. Well, compared to proper laptops, they’re basically whatLego is to proper bricks. They’re smaller, lighter and much better looking. A netbooks main job is to surf the Internet, hence the name netbook.
Although they usually come with a tiny set of specs, ie - less than 1GB of RAM, a slower processor, they will do all the everyday jobs you need. You can write your next essay, surf the net to check up on the news and listen to music. The only point where they fall down is that, since they have such a small memory, you can’t do these all at once. Netbooks are like men - they can’t multi-task. Unless it’s a few easy tasks. Also they don’t come with a disk drive meaning you can’t use disks in them - so if you want any programs, you’ll have to download them.
But these sacrifices are not worthless. Oh no. The point for them all, is that:
They’re unbelievably small and light - I’m talking just over a kilo, compared to some laptops that can weigh up to 3 times as much as this. A netbook’s screen is around 9 inches compared to the 15 inches of a laptop - noinnuendos please. Netbooks are dirt cheap (in electronics terms). I picked one up roughly six months ago for £219. You could buy two for the price of a laptop. Many get supplied with a version of Linux - a free alternative to Microsoft Windows. This means that, if you’re willing to learn a new operating system, which really, is not hard at all, you can shave up to £70 of the price. And you have the option of putting on Windows if you want.
Of course as mentioned before, you can’t do memory intensive tasks on them. So if you want to listen to music while writing that essay, you can either chug along slowly using the computer for both, or turn on your CD player. You can’t play games on them of course, except small, lightweight games.
I will do write a review of my netbook - a HP 2133 - in a couple of days and will mention a bit more about Linux. Until then have have fun and keep blogging!