Posted: 3/12/2010 4:04:41 PM EDT
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I'm looking to get one of those little laptops. All I need it for is transferring data via USB from my hi def camcorder. Will a $350 netbook with 1GB of ram work? How long would it take to transfer 1GB of data? Would the 4GB of Ram make the transfer faster? Also what is Windows starter? All I'm looking for is a big ass thumb drive basically, but I might jump online once in a while to check email.
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| Get the cheapest one you can find. Acer has a good deal. Try to get a 10" screen. Most have the same processor and a 160 gb hard drive which is plenty. Takes a while to transfer files over USB, it can be a "set it and forget it" overnight thing. You want at least 2 gb ram for win xp and 4 for any flavor of windows 7. If the camcorder uses SD cards the netbooks often have SD slots which will be the fastest way to copy to HD. |
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If you get one that has an SD card slot (mine does), it can copy a lot of data to the internal drive fairly quickly.
More RAM won't necessarily make it faster. In fact, more RAM will not necessarily make ANY computer faster. It only makes for more speed if your computer is using more memory than you have RAM. Once you have enough RAM, you won't see any speed improvements. |
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Get the cheapest one you can find. Acer has a good deal. Try to get a 10" screen. Most have the same processor and a 160 gb hard drive which is plenty. Takes a while to transfer files over USB, it can be a "set it and forget it" overnight thing. You want at least 2 gb ram for win xp and 4 for any flavor of windows 7. If the camcorder uses SD cards the netbooks often have SD slots which will be the fastest way to copy to HD. My Asus Eeepc 1005 has 1GB RAM and it runs fine. You don't need a ton of RAM unless you're doing more intense stuff. I do intend to bump it to 2GB, but there's no reason to go with more in a low-performance machine like a netbook. |
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Quoted: I'm looking to get one of those little laptops. All I need it for is transferring data via USB from my hi def camcorder. Will a $350 netbook with 1GB of ram work? How long would it take to transfer 1GB of data? Would the 4GB of Ram make the transfer faster? Also what is Windows starter? All I'm looking for is a big ass thumb drive basically, but I might jump online once in a while to check email. I'm posting on mine now - had it over a year. It will do everything you need for it to do. I'm not a big fan of the tiny screen size. If you're not working it 8 hours a day, you'll be fine. |
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How long do you think it would take to transfer 16GBs from an external hard drive? Also do any have PCMCIA slots anymore? My desktop is a Quad Core Duel with 6 Gigs of Ram and does it in about 12 minutes. My camera takes these. Expensive little guys so I'm trying to avoid buying two of them. I can either pull it out and put it into the laptop, or transmit via USB.
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Netbooks are nothing more than a PDA scaled up to have a "real" keyboard and monitor. They have their uses but are not a replacement for a real laptop with a real processor. Netbooks are good if all you want to do is check your email, post on arfcom, and maybe watch a Divx movie or two. nothing more. |
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Netbooks are nothing more than a PDA scaled up to have a "real" keyboard and monitor. They have their uses but are not a replacement for a real laptop with a real processor. Netbooks are good if all you want to do is check your email, post on arfcom, and maybe watch a Divx movie or two. nothing more. This is most definitely not anywhere close to being accurate. A netbook is a scaled down laptop. They're roughly equivalent in processing power to a 4 year old laptop or so, they're usually limited to 1 or 2 gb of ram, they have too-small keyboards and screens, but other than that they're fine. I've cranked out tons of code on mine, used it for video chatting, used Google Earth, Skype, IRC chat clients, MS Office, and plenty of other software on mine. I wouldn't try to do any significant video editing on one, the graphics card isn't normally going to be suitable for that, but calling it a PDA is ridiculous. |
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How long do you think it would take to transfer 16GBs from an external hard drive? Also do any have PCMCIA slots anymore? My desktop is a Quad Core Duel with 6 Gigs of Ram and does it in about 12 minutes. My camera takes these. Expensive little guys so I'm trying to avoid buying two of them. I can either pull it out and put it into the laptop, or transmit via USB. Couldn't tell you EXACTLY how long it will take, but it will be a bit slower than your desktop, just due to a slower chipset. And how did you get your Quad cores to duel? Who won? 
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Are you going to do anything with the video (editing and whatnot) after you transfer it? If the answer is "no" just get whatever the hell you want. If the answer is "yes" the discussion becomes more complex. No video editing, not even going to play minesweeper, only data transfer and storage. I got the fancy desktop for editing.. 
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Are you going to do anything with the video (editing and whatnot) after you transfer it? If the answer is "no" just get whatever the hell you want. If the answer is "yes" the discussion becomes more complex. No video editing, not even going to play minesweeper, only data transfer and storage. I got the fancy desktop for editing.. Why not just get an external hard drive then? 500gb can be had for around $100 |
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Are you going to do anything with the video (editing and whatnot) after you transfer it? If the answer is "no" just get whatever the hell you want. If the answer is "yes" the discussion becomes more complex. No video editing, not even going to play minesweeper, only data transfer and storage. I got the fancy desktop for editing.. Why not just get an external hard drive then? 500gb can be had for around $100 lots of 2TB externals on Newegg right now for about $160 |
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Are you going to do anything with the video (editing and whatnot) after you transfer it? If the answer is "no" just get whatever the hell you want. If the answer is "yes" the discussion becomes more complex. No video editing, not even going to play minesweeper, only data transfer and storage. I got the fancy desktop for editing.. Why not just get an external hard drive then? 500gb can be had for around $100 lots of 2TB externals on Newegg right now for about $160 I would still need a computer to tell it to put the data on an external. What I'm really looking for is speed in data transfer. I like the netbook idea because it's portable and cheap but it won't work if it takes 2 hours to offload 16 GB of data. (That's about 16 minutes on an HD camera.) |
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Are you going to do anything with the video (editing and whatnot) after you transfer it? If the answer is "no" just get whatever the hell you want. If the answer is "yes" the discussion becomes more complex. No video editing, not even going to play minesweeper, only data transfer and storage. I got the fancy desktop for editing.. Why not just get an external hard drive then? 500gb can be had for around $100 lots of 2TB externals on Newegg right now for about $160 I would still need a computer to tell it to put the data on an external. What I'm really looking for is speed in data transfer. I like the netbook idea because it's portable and cheap but it won't work if it takes 2 hours to offload 16 GB of data. (That's about 16 minutes on an HD camera.) youre mostly limited by the transfer method and hard drive write speed. usb 2 will be slower than esata and esata will be slower than usb 3 (but both devices have to be usb 3 compliant) |
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Netbooks are nothing more than a PDA scaled up to have a "real" keyboard and monitor. They have their uses but are not a replacement for a real laptop with a real processor. Netbooks are good if all you want to do is check your email, post on arfcom, and maybe watch a Divx movie or two. nothing more. This is most definitely not anywhere close to being accurate. A netbook is a scaled down laptop. They're roughly equivalent in processing power to a 4 year old laptop or so, they're usually limited to 1 or 2 gb of ram, they have too-small keyboards and screens, but other than that they're fine. I've cranked out tons of code on mine, used it for video chatting, used Google Earth, Skype, IRC chat clients, MS Office, and plenty of other software on mine. I wouldn't try to do any significant video editing on one, the graphics card isn't normally going to be suitable for that, but calling it a PDA is ridiculous. cool! I am thinking about getting one and want to be able to use it for geocaching and stuff, which would require me to be able to run some gps apps and google earth. |
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Netbooks are nothing more than a PDA scaled up to have a "real" keyboard and monitor. They have their uses but are not a replacement for a real laptop with a real processor. Netbooks are good if all you want to do is check your email, post on arfcom, and maybe watch a Divx movie or two. nothing more. This is most definitely not anywhere close to being accurate. A netbook is a scaled down laptop. They're roughly equivalent in processing power to a 4 year old laptop or so, they're usually limited to 1 or 2 gb of ram, they have too-small keyboards and screens, but other than that they're fine. I've cranked out tons of code on mine, used it for video chatting, used Google Earth, Skype, IRC chat clients, MS Office, and plenty of other software on mine. I wouldn't try to do any significant video editing on one, the graphics card isn't normally going to be suitable for that, but calling it a PDA is ridiculous. cool! I am thinking about getting one and want to be able to use it for geocaching and stuff, which would require me to be able to run some gps apps and google earth. Just in case you aren't aware, to use Google Earth with a GPS costs you 400 bucks a year for the pro version. 
You can still use the free version, you'll just have to manually transfer your coordinates over from a GPS –– Google Earth's free version won't accept input directly from a GPS. It's still an outstanding mapping program. Also, Google Earth requires an internet connection. They do have netbooks that have both GPS and 3G cards, though. Regardless, I like my Dell Mini-9 –– But I also run OSX on it. 
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Quoted: Netbooks are nothing more than a PDA scaled up to have a "real" keyboard and monitor. They have their uses but are not a replacement for a real laptop with a real processor. Netbooks are good if all you want to do is check your email, post on arfcom, and maybe watch a Divx movie or two. nothing more. Thank heavens that I did not run into you before I bought my netbook - I guess all the power-points I've designed for my classes this year, all the term papers I've written, and all the stuff I've done on my Acer Aspire One would have been done on a larger computer that cost 2 times as much. |