Posted: 11/2/2010 9:36:18 AM EDT
| Wifey wants a netbook. I'm not sure what they can/can't do. She really only needs internet surfing, and Office/Excel/Powerpoint for schoolwork. Can a netbook handle this? |
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<–– Asus 1000HE owner here.
Yes they can do all that. They excel at doing simple tasks at low cost and in a small package. Keyboards can be a problem; just buy one that has a conventional layout. You'd be surprised how many netbooks don't have a conventional keyboard. Look at the lower right hand side; the arrow keys, shift and control keys can be out of kilter. Biggest PITA is the screen size. On my netbook you are stuck with 1024x600 or something (instead of SVGA 1024x768). But that's a small price to pay for the portability and price. I recommend upgrading the RAM to 2 GB on a Windows XP machine. It'll only run you $30 or so. |
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I'm using one right now. It's fairly good at most things. Just make sure you get one with the 1.83ghz atom. Mine is slightly slower and could really use that extra speed. . |
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Quoted: <–– Asus 1000HE owner here. Yes they can do all that. They excel at doing simple tasks at low cost and in a small package. Keyboards can be a problem; just buy one that has a conventional layout. You'd be surprised how many netbooks don't have a conventional keyboard. Look at the lower right hand side; the arrow keys, shift and control keys can be out of kilter. Biggest PITA is the screen size. On my netbook you are stuck with 1024x600 or something (instead of SVGA 1024x768). But that's a small price to pay for the portability and price. I recommend upgrading the RAM to 2 GB on a Windows XP machine. It'll only run you $30 or so. Extra ram is something which really benefits these things.  |
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I've got an MSI Wind. Great for surfing the internet and will last for about 9 hours on battery. I picked up an extra battery on Ebay for cheap. I use it when I don't want to sit at a desktop. I also have a laptop but rarely use it.
Keyboard is fine on the MSI Wind and the screen is plenty big for internet surfing in my opinion. |
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Netbooks suck. Slow, keyboard too small, and screen way too small to do any real work. OK for traveling, I use might for LIGHT surfing and mostly to rip pictures off memory cards when on the road. anything more and they are too small. get a 12 or 13" screen small laptop and she'll be way happier. |
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A netbook will be under powered as the only computer involved in schoolwork. If you have another computer at home to do some of that stuff on that's OK. If it's the student's ONLY computer, you will regret getting an underpowered computer. You can get a near-kick-ass laptop for not a whole lot more. Don't fall for the cuteness factor. Cute is for kittens not computers.
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My Asus netbook works great for word processing and PPT presentations (Atom N280 processor). The cool part is the 8-10 hour battery life, and it is easy/compact to travel with through the airport. The iPad is great except it only does internet/media surfing well and nothing else. The netbook is basically a circa-2000 PC but in a much more compact format. Run Windows 7 and it will be fast. |
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Wifey wants a netbook. I'm not sure what they can/can't do. She really only needs internet surfing, and Office/Excel/Powerpoint for schoolwork. Can a netbook handle this? Good for this. Not too good for this. My acer aspire one does those things fine, and will run AutoCAD ok (if you give it a couple of minutes to start the program). |
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I have an EEE 900 and EEE 1000. If you upgrade the RAM you'll be happier. It works ok for school in that you can DL ppt, pdf, or word files to it while in class. The battery should last all day in class as well. I wouldn't try writing a term paper on it since the keyboard can be cramped. The bigger screen the easier it will be to type on. The primary computer home can be used for writing and netbook can be used for editing. I often took notes for my biochem class in the ppt files. Taking the EEE to class was much more enjoyable than hauling around my 15" laptop. I took a statistics class using my EEE 900 and it worked fine. The computer wasn't too slow. I just had to copy the CD associated with the class to a USB drive so I could access the needed xls files that were worked on in class. |
| A netbook would make a good backup computer for when she justs want to surf the internet. If she's going to be doing a lot of powerpoint/word document/etc. then she'll need a full laptop or desktop. If she'll only be doing a little of the office stuff then a netbook would work just fine for her. With Black Friday coming up if you're willing to brave the lines then you should be able to get a decent laptop and netbook for around $600, possibly less. |
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I think they are roughly the same speed as this old Pentium D I am typing on. So yes - they are as fast as a 6 year old desktop (which works just find for excel, internet, and word processing) My humble understanding is that they were alergic to Vista (way too bloted), but 2000 and 2007 are clean enough OS's to get usable performance from the processors. |
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I use one quite often. Not quite a capable as a laptop but a hell of a lot more compact.
Yeah, I think it would work for the programs you listed. Oh, my netbook is going to work with me tonight so I can keep up on late breaking election news, (I work in a vehicle mainte... Aww, I am a mechanic and work in a garage.) |
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I got a Dell netbook to surf the web and watch movies while traveling. It has no problem running DVDs(stored on the hard drive as ISO files) or standard def h.264 movies. I wouldn't want to do any "serious" work on it like creating power points or spreadsheets, the screen is just too small for that. One thing I can't stand is that fucking touch pad mouse thing. I hate it more than touch pads on normal laptops because the click buttons are not separate from the pad and if you try to "drang and drop" the cursor to flips out because of their being multiple sources of input.  |
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Quoted: So can netbooks (the sub $500 variety) handle full screen Hulu and Netflix? If it has an ION video chip, then yes, if not, then.... maybe... Was watching streaming episodes of Archer on Netflix last night on my EEE 9" and it ran fine except for 1 or 2 random slowdowns.
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If she is going to be doing a lot of production work on it, i.e. Excel, Word, and Powerpoint, she will appreciate the extra screen real estate and larger keyboard available with a 13 inch class laptop. Netbook is OK, but I wouldn't want to work with one all day, unless it was strictly for internet and social media. |
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Quoted: My HP netbook does them fine as well (I upgraded to 2 gb RAM). It's not the netbook I want to throw out the window after using it for a while to do real work. I want to throw myself out the window. Screen and keyboard are too small for extended real work in my opinion.Quoted: Quoted: Wifey wants a netbook. I'm not sure what they can/can't do. She really only needs internet surfing, and Office/Excel/Powerpoint for schoolwork. Can a netbook handle this? Good for this. Not too good for this. My acer aspire one does those things fine, and will run AutoCAD ok (if you give it a couple of minutes to start the program). |
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Netbook: Sacrificing computing power for extreme portability. This. They work great in a limited way. Real handy to take along to find a wifi spot. Took our Acer along on a recent road trip. some light surfing in the hotel room andchecking email. Used it as a 'digital wallet' to back up our digital cameras. Used it while driving thru a hellish thunderstorm enroute to the Grand Canyon to look at a webcam to see if the Canyon was worth continuing towards (wasn't). Buy a model with more than the basic RAM. They get bogged down fast if you multitask too much. But if you get anywhere above $300 try to get a laptop instead. There's some very good models around $500 and the much bigger screens will be much appreciated / needed if this will be a daily use device. |
| bought a netbook about a month ago. Great for watching movies on long flights and the ultraportability is nice, however, a reasonably small laptop is a better compromise for all-around use. We plan on picking up a budget laptop in the near future for much of our use. |
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I have a pretty cool toshiba netbook, it's one of the larger ones. I have 4gb of ram and real windows 7, not windows starter. The keyboard is pretty nice as well. But the screen resolution kills my eyes if I look at it for any length of time. The processor is slow, netbooks have smaller slower ones, there is some things it just can't do, like some photo and movie editing. But for most things it's fine.
I love mine, and it does more than I thought it would, but it would not be my only computer. If your wife has access to a larger one every now and then I would think she would be fine. |
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Quoted: Any cheap places to shop online for these? And do I need a data plan, or is wifi ok? They have built in wifi capabilities. I don't think you need a data plan.  Most Netbooks cost about the same. Usually 300-350 or so. Check out my link earlier in the thread.
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Wifey wants a netbook. I'm not sure what they can/can't do. She really only needs internet surfing, and Office/Excel/Powerpoint for schoolwork. Can a netbook handle this? Yes. if you already have a good monitor and a keyboard/mouse to plug into it. That'll make Office tolerable. Surfing is fine with the built-in monitor/keyboard. Got one for $200 last year on tigerdirect. |
| I've got an Asus eee pc with the AMD processor, 2 GB RAM and a 1366x768 12" screen. I love it and take it to work with me and has been great fro traveling with the kds as they can watch movies on it. I dual boot it with XP and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It is powerful enough that I can play games up to Half Life 2 at playable frame rates. |
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I have the Acer. I bought it for work. After using it, it is pretty small, 10.1, I think. I'm 52 and its getting harder to read it, especially in poor light.If she has a lot to read, documents, spread sheets, etc, it gets tiring. I'm going to start bringing my Dell laptop. The screen is bigger, but not much. I want one of those laptops with the 17-18 inch screens. |
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Quoted: Wifey wants a netbook. I'm not sure what they can/can't do. She really only needs internet surfing, and Office/Excel/Powerpoint for schoolwork. Can a netbook handle this? They are very 'capable' of running slow, typing a '9' when you pressed '0' (not fat-fingered, but actually pressed '0' and get 9 or 90 instead), and so on... Cheap, cheap, cheap & all the bad that comes with it... |