Netbooks for Beginners

By Matthew Kerridge

A netbook is a great solution for students and business travelers. Lighter in weight than the traditional laptop, the features they all share are web browsers, common office programs such as word processing and spreadsheets, and a small photo editor. As inner city Wifi connectivity becomes more available, notebooks are a lightweight and inexpensive way to keep in touch with the office or home.

A Word about Netbook Add-0ns A DVD drive costs around $80.00, a 2G memory upgrade costs approximately $30.00. (Please check your netbook can take more memory, before purchasing.) Another device popular with netbook owners is the wireless mouse with prices around $50.00 for an average model. To use the internet anywhere add a Wifi dongle, also known as a USB modem, which operates on pre-paid cards and can receive a signal anywhere a hand phone can.

Netbooks v Laptops The larger amount of memory and faster performance of laptops is appreciated by those who do not have a basic desktop computer at home. Traveling with a netbook is a breeze, encased in only a light sleeve they neatly fit into medium bags and weigh a lot less than laptops. If price is an issue, consider that netbooks, which start at about $200.00, do cost about a quarter less than a full laptop. Much of that price is for the DVD player and extra memory, which may not be utilized and can be added later, if needed.

Netbook Memory Explained Netbooks have smaller memories to keep costs lower, so they will be slower than a typical laptop, but not that much. Their memories are upgradeable, in many cases and if they are used in conjunction with a home PC, the typical memory range of from 30G to 160G is not a significant limit to usage. Supporting familiar internet browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Thunderbird, netbooks are only slow in loading net pages where a lot of flash content is present. O.S. is usually Windows XP, as Vista consumes too much memory.

Advances in Netbook Screens In miniaturizing some features of a laptop, obviously the screen needed to shrink. To compensate for that, some new features were introduced that many laptops do not yet posses. One of these is the ability to see screens well in bright sunlight. This is due to the common use of back-lit LCD screens for netbooks. Resolutions as high as 1025 by 600 have been spotted on some netbooks, and the trend does seem to be that cutting edge developments are being added to notebooks while laptops are slower to benefit from them.

Does a Netbook fit your Needs? If you travel a lot, the answer would be a definite yes, providing lightening speed and huge storage without the use of external hard drives is not important to you. Students will also love the lighter weight in their backpacks, where a netbook fits easily. Many business users already have found the small amount of space needed for written documents fits easily on a smaller memory and appreciate the lower cost. At present available in every color and an assortment of sizes, netbooks are the fastest selling category of portable computers

The Next Generation of Netbooks As the netbook generation grows up, improvements will make today's offering look as slow as yesterday's laptops, widening their appeal to gamers, photographers and others who typically need huge amounts of processing ability. Manufacturers are already starting to load netbooks with larger processors, in some case the duo core range, and much larger Ram and memory, which brings them much closer to full laptop capabilities.

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