What‘s so different about Netbooks?
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It’s pretty easy to tell a netbook from other laptops, the size gives it away. The difference between one netbook and the other is getting to be less with each new model that’s introduced on the market. All of them generally have 8-to-10-inch wide screens and lack built-in optical drives. None of them have full-size keyboards—they about 90% of a full size keyboard. So you’ll have to get used to a much smaller keyboard. It’s a good idea to try out the keyboard before you make a purchase. They offer an abundance of USB ports, they also have a webcam, a card reader, and built-in Wi-Fi. Some even offer bonus features like ExpressCard slots, Bluetooth, and options for cellular modems. Most all of the netbook manufacturers has adopted the Intel Atom platform. It’s made up of the Atom processor, integrated graphics, and 512MB to 1GB of RAM.
What can I expect from a Netbook?
Don’t underestimate the capabilities of these small computers. They do much more than web surfing. They offer spreadsheets and word processing. You can download your photos from a digital camera and edit them using a any photo editing software. With some practice, you can transcode video to another format using Windows Media Encoder 9 or edit video footage using Adobe Premiere Elements 7. You can run your entire music library off of a program like Apple iTunes. A netbook can play video from sites like YouTube or a movie from an external USB drive. Businesses have began to use these miniature laptops because they have the ability to run various e-mail clients on them, put them on a network, install a VPN client, and secure them with antivirus and antispyware suites.
You’re probably not going to use a netbook as your primary heavy-lifting machine, but if you need a small, easy-to-use, and decently fast machine to take on the road, a netbook is a good bet.
Highly portable and increasingly powerful, Netbooks are all the rage.
