Netbooks/Notebooks/lil' Laptops

[Fjorab_Teke]

OK, so this tends to be a good group to ask questions for technology and gaming type stuff.

Windows 7 apparently comes out late next month, and I am VERY tempted to get a small laptop computer of some kind, hoping that they come out reasonably priced before I move. But if move-date comes before the 22nd, I might get an XP-based mini-laptop of some kind.

Basically, I want something that has the following qualities:
lightweight
about 9-12 inches
durable
good processor
good battery life (> 4 hours)
DVD+RW drive
wireless internet reception (bonus if it also has the ability to hook up directly to a high-speed modem cable)
not Dell (it has ONE nice color and color-coded ports, but I hate everything else)

I got tempted by the idea after seeing a netbook at Target with XP for about $350. And I've been thinking a LONG time about something like this, especially with an upcoming move and continued frequent travels.
Do any of you have any ideas, advice, and experiences to share?

(I also played with a friend's Wii tonight, much fun, very temtped to eventually get one too.)
(c/p my LJ)

[AngharadTy]

The Wii will see a price drop to $200 this Sunday, so wait for that to buy one. I love mine. ^_^

On a netbook, you're not likely to see a DVD drive, but there are small laptops that aren't netbooks that will have them. With laptops especially, I recommend trying them in person. You can tell if the construction/material feels cheap from touching it much more easily than if you look at it online. (By all means, look into reviews online, but make sure you can touch it before buying.) For me, one thing that I need to tell for myself is how the touchpad feels. Some of the models out now feel just awful to mouse around with. I'm very, very picky about the touchpad. But seeing how they show fingerprints and whatnot matters to me, too.

Acer has good quality builds; Lenovo has good quality as well but can be a bit pricier. Toshiba can also be good, but check reviews for the models you like.

[Fjorab_Teke]

My husband has a Toshiba, and he's pretty rough on things too. My current widescreen desktop monitor is Acer, and after 2 years it's starting to get lines across. Otherwise, it's really nice.

Another thing that would be neat is a tablet ability, but it's not needed. I think I saw a Toshiba like that once, don't know how good it was.

And yeah, I won't likely get a Wii, IF I do, until maybe next year.

[thelonetiel]

I have the HP Pavilion tx2525 I think. A little old (well, a year), but if you can find an upgrade version, I love it.

It is mostly just a small laptop, it has DVD drive and everything, and I think a 12 inch screen. I don't have any complaints except for Vista, but that's not HP's fault. It's also the tablet version, which is very nice. I was just showing it off to a few new friends earlier.

If you have a Best Buy or similar in your area, it really felt best to me to be able to handle the computer, figure out size and weight, keyboard configuration, etc., stuff that's hard to do online.

Also stop by the library and see if they have Consumer Reports magazine. They did an issue on net books recently, as in maybe April or May or something, and good reviews on things like battery life and such.

[Wingsrising]

I personally LOVE my TabletPC, but they're not generally cheap. (At least, not small and cheap...)

Do keep in mind, though, that a small laptop with a fast processor, good battery life, and an optical drive is NOT going to be cheap. With laptops I generally feel like you can pick two of three things: size, performance, and price. If it's small and high-performance, it's going to be expensive.

Netbooks aren't very powerful, processor-wise. But they're small, they're cheap, and if all you want is to surf the Internet it might perfect.

[Fjorab_Teke]

Well, the one thing that I think is conspicuously lacking about netbooks is, like Ty said, a DVD drive - a MUST for me. How else are you going to watch movies on the go (short of buying a portable DVD player - which I'd want this to double for), make CDs of music/pictures/etc. and install new not-internet-downloaded software?

And yeah, the whole issue is how much can I justify paying, and will I be able to do so? For something of really good quality, since the desktop computer is nearing 3 years old (so yeah I underestimated the age of this Acer monitor), it might be nearing time to replace and retire it to someone. And I'm growing weary of the whole desktop computer idea, since good portable computers are becoming more available, and the printer/scanner we have is fairly small and wireless.

[Wingsrising]

I make CDs of music/pictures/etc and install non-downloaded-software with an external drive. You don't need an internal drive for that unless you plan to do it on-the-go a lot. If you're going to do those things at your desk, an external drive works fine.

Playing games that require a CD in the drive has also not been an issue for me. Besides being (I think) less common these days, you can just rip an image to the hard drive and then mount the image as a drive. This also has the advantage that it's much faster than loading the game from the CD.

I watch movies by ripping them to my hard drive. Advantage: uses less battery power than watching them with an optical drive. Disadvantage: more of a pain in the butt (requires advance preparation and a fair amount of disk space unless you want to do MORE preparation), need DVD-ripper software (which may be harder to come by these days).

I don't mind so much because I tend to watch the same favorite moves again and again when I travel. If you want to rent movies to watch while you travel, then it's a bigger disadvantage.

At the time I bought my laptop, the computer I wanted wasn't available with an optical drive, so I do without: all other things being equal, I'd prefer an optical drive, but it wasn't a deal-breaker for me. I don't mind ripping the occasional movie to watch while I travel. But depending on how much you watch movies on the go, YMMV.

[Fjorab_Teke]

Yeah, I have an external DVD burner for the desktop, actually (and it's pretty well dead now - or unresponsive anyway ), but if I'm moving around with the computer a lot, I'd like the DVD drive to be internal. But if I can load the DVDs via external drive and not pay an outlandish amount for it plus decent software without it barking at me for copyright issues, I'd be open to that option especially if it would mean that I can have something notebook-sized and a great battery life. I'd be content to have maybe 5 movies and all my CDs loaded on there (I'm doing the CDs for a major project anyway). I don't need the drive for games. Everything I'd want to play is either completely installed or online (Neo).

I'd really like ports for stuff, like being able to hook up my camera, BlackBerry, a mouse (maybe if I can't stand using the trackpad), etc.

Thanks everyone, I'm getting lots of great ideas I hadn't thought of.

[Chandi]

I am going to put a good recommendation in for HP Minis. I've had mine for 3 months now and been toting it around constantly in Chile. Here's the specs on it...

> Extended battery (it's one of the large ones that slightly bulks the back of the computer, but I like how it props up... plus it gives me 6 hours off a full charge)
> 1.66Ghz, 1 GB RAM, wireless internet
> Integrated webcam and microphone
> 3 USB ports, VGA output, cable hook-up, internal card reader (takes a few kinds of camera cards, just put it right in), headphone jack, and a lock
> Weighs about 2.7 pounds, even with the big battery, 10.1" screen
> Choice of drives... a Solid State up to 32 GB, or a regular with 160 GB
> Windows XP (with the damn trial version of Office '07)

On the question of durability... I've dropped it several times, one time really badly - the screen went all crazy. Turning it off, then back on, fixed it. It's also withstood being in a foreign country, being constantly hooked through a adapter, and being toted around just about every day. As far as I know, they start in the $300 range, and I got some upgrades on mine and it came out to about $420 or so... but I love it so much more than a regular laptop now.

So yeah, I definitely put in a vote of confidence on the HP Minis. But best thing is, take a look at stuff in stores before buying. I know I had to just to make sure I could handle something this tiny.

[daisybell]

The thing about a netbook is that it's not designed to be able to do everything an ordinary notebook/laptop would do. People who expect that a netbook will perform just as well as a regular laptop have been disappointed at how slow it was when they were multitasking or editing videos etc.

When the hard drive of my laptop (which was my desktop replacement too) died this summer aged nearly 6 I turned to my netbook as a stopgap, and never really got round to replacing my laptop- mostly because I wanted to wait for Windows 7 and found that the netbook wasn't so bad with a full sized keyboard and a mouse attached. But I bought my netbook to be lightweight, portable, fast to boot up and durable- which is why I chose one with no moving parts at all. It has the added bonus of running silently because of this, but not everyone wants a solid state drive instead of a traditional hard drive because you get a lot less space for your money. I also chose Linux, so I didn't have to run the sorts of programs that are essential in Windows to stop you from getting infected with malware, using precious processing power; Linux is also more lightweight on processing and disk space too. And I chose to have a really small netbook too, with a 9 inch screen, because I wanted it to be really portable and didn't expect to need the keyboard for any intense typing. Personally, I think SSDs, Linux and as small as you can cope with are the way to go for a netbook, but most manufacturers and customers seem to disagree with me- they discontinued my model after not that long on the market and sadly Linux netbooks have become harder to find.

I think you need to be clear about exactly what you need from a small, portable computer- should it be really pared down to only the essentials (web browsing, listening to music and light office tasks)? Or do you need to compromise functionality versus size and cost, to be able to watch DVDs and rip CDs on the move? If the back to basics approach isn't going to suit you, then a true netbook won't be the right computer for you. The boundaries between "netbook" and "notebook" are becoming rather blurred though, I was reading a review of netbooks recently which included machines costing £500 ($800) which is hardly cheap, back to basics computing IMO- it's going into the subnotebook category, where you pay a premium for a smaller computer.

[Fjorab_Teke]

Well, I'd like something more powerful and with more disk space than a netbook generally has, and I'm finding from a little research that I'd like something slightly bigger than one for screen size and resolution. 12-13.5 inches is starting to seem just about right. But I'm also finding that there are lots of options to choose from in several ranges.

I'm mostly concerned about smoothly handling internet (including networking sites that have various elements that chug up a lot of memory), DVD/music playback, and Neopets-style games.

I'm expecting to pay about $1000 US if I get one.

[Fjorab_Teke]

OK, an update: so my husband and I went browsing around, and I saw the Toshiba A505-S6960 at Best Buy.

It's a little big, a little heavy, and might not be "durable" - but wow look at the specs on that computer! For the price and the overwhelming good reviews, I don't think I'm going to find anything that will beat it.