Kevin's Watch

julie and I are looking for a portable computer to tool around with.

what we want...

internet, youtube, facebook, hook up at hotels, mp3 capability.

a bonus would be to be able to watch dvds and play cds.

cost is very important.

what would you reccomend?

Try to get a netbook with a built-in hard drive. Beorn has an Acer AspireOne and Hyperception has an MSI, both of which do what you are looking for, other than play DVDs or CDs. We got an external DVD burner/reader for that purpose, but it is not something either of them usually lug around with the netbook. They use it at home to add programs to the netbook or to watch videos, etc.

Many netbooks do not come with a built-in hard drive and I have heard those that don't do very, very little. Whatever you do, avoid those which run Windows CE as their OS.

Sarge, I would say it depends on how light you intend to pack. I've got a netbook that I travel with, but mine, like most (as Menolly points out), doesn't have a built-in CD/DVD drive. I'm okay with that, as when I travel, I don't use the netbook for much more than playing solitaire, surfing the web and maybe occasionally writing something in Word. But it was a problem when I got a bad sector on the hard drive and had to send it in for service. The company installed a new hard drive with Windows 7 Starter -- but I didn't have any disks to reload MS Office 2007 (I'd bought it as a download) and will now have to find an alternative (probably OpenOffice).

Also, the screen on the netbook is kind of small, which makes it a little annoying to use.

If you're mostly traveling by car and size/weight aren't an issue, I'd get a regular laptop.

Is this the right forum for this?

--A

Feel free to move it, Mr. Admin, sir!

Loresraat I think. But I'll leave a shadow topic behind.

--A

thanks for the replies - julie will print them and any further. that way he can make an informed choice.

av - had no idea we had a tech forum. even though a quick search says i have posted there 188 times.

how odd. sorry about that.

btw - after reading my posts there - seems i am a bit antitechnology.

Hahaha, no probs.

--A

Avatar wrote:Hahaha, no probs.

--A

it is typical of me. at home one day growing up i noticed a picture above a doorway. i asked my folks how long it had been there. about five years it seems.

and julie and i were watching a home dec show when house colors came up. after questioning julie realized i had no idea what color our house was - after some 8 years living here.

I'm a little bit late to this topic, but since I happen to have been in the PC industry since the mid 80's, I'll bullishly throw in my 2 cents' worth.

For "tooling around" with internet, youtube, facebook, hook up at hotels, mp3 capability, then a Netbook will be fine for your purposes, especially if cost is a prime criterion for you. This is pretty much what a Netbook is made for - those types of functions and its optimised portability.

As other have said, if CD/DVD functionality is key to you, then since the absence of any optical drive is the defining characteristic of a Netbook, you're a bit screwed there. Of course you can always go for an external USB based optical unit, but that will largely detract both from portability and potential cost savings.

Go for a standard Windows O/S - either XP if stock still exists, or Windows 7. Your compromises will be on screen size. 10.1" is the smallest practical size, but 12.2" is better, though a little more costly and harder to find these days.

Standard spec would be an Intel Atom @ 1.7GHz or better, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. Check for external VGA being there, because you may want to wire an external TFT at some stage. Plenty of USB ports is good, too.

Take a long hard look at keyboard size - many manufacturers haven't designed well, to the extent that their keyboard layouts end up severely cramped, because they don't extend near enough to the edge of the top casing.

And do NOT compromise on brand - the cheapest is very definitely NOT the best option. I don't work for a manufacturer so I have no agenda here, but long experience leads me to recommend Samsung every time, and also maybe Toshiba. Avoid Acer, Asus and MSI like the plague.

Oh and don't touch PC type tablets yet - they've got an awful long way to go before anyone's worked out what they're meant to be for and thus they haven't yet had cost optimization designed in. Currently, they're over-engineered and unergonomic - basically expensive Windows- based things that are a pain to use.

thank you for your help. i appreciate every's answers.

I recently went through my own such research and purchase. I settled on a laptop. It is possible to find a healthy price range for either -- but I ended up choosing a laptop because it gave me more power and flexiblity than a netbook.
Size is a subjective and entirely bipolar issue. We simultaneously want the largest and brightest screen possible, yet we also want the overall device to remain as light and portable as possible. These are opposed goals. Need to look at several in your price range and find one that balances the two to your satisfaction -- and I agree with TheFallen that brand is also something to watch out for. I ended up buying an HP Pavilion laptop.
For me, the netbooks were very nice on form via ease of portability, but overly thin on function (no CD/DVD drive, small screen).

dw

thank you. going to look at best buy tonight - not buying just shopping around.