Netbook recommendations please

What are the current brand/model recommendations for a netbook?

My requirements are:

• Email
• Simple Excel spreadsheet creation/edit
• Simple Word doc creation/edit
• Some web surfing
• Budget <=$500

Thanks!

I got one of the Google Chrome netbooks. You can't install Word or Excel, but you can use any of the online equivalents. For the price I paid (nothing) it's quite amazing. If I had to pay money for it, I don't know what I'd be willing to pay. Not a ton as it's just a browser, really.

I got the wife one of these for Christmas. She loves it.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004AWIQ3C/ref=oss_product

The current top recommendations are the "seashell" series from ASUS. Everyone seems to drool over those, and for good reason.

Here, I got a $300 Samsung N210, which is absolutely brilliant. But the non-USA keyboard layout might deter others. Apparently the USA market gets one with a USA keyboard, but also with a smaller capacity battery too.

Cheers

Frankly, I'd say get the cheapest one you can find from a reputable manufacturer. A $500 budget will essentially leave you able to afford 95% of what people would consider a "netbook."

I have a 2-3 year old MSI Wind U100 that's still going strong.

MSI, ASUS, Dell, HP. I think those are the primary netbook companies, though I feel like I'm forgetting a couple. I say just get one of those and you'll be set.

On the other hand, if $500 is truly your limit and you're willing to go up to it, probably the best of what's still considered a netbook is the Asus Seashell line, like this one. 12" screen and dual-core Atom CPU.

*edit*
Darn, Mark beat me to the punch on the Seashell

Thats impressive marketing spin. Free 500GB worth of dropbox style web drive storage so they claim it comes with 750GB "hybrid" storage ><

The actual laptop itself does look nice though excluding that dubious marketing bit above

Yeah, LOL at the marketing claim on the 1215N but it does look like a nice unit!

A couple I looked at are the HP Mini 110 3538 and the Lenovo S10, the HP only because of its 'perfect' score and price, and the Lenovo as the Thinkpads have a good reputation and I thought that may rub off on this one. Thoughts on those two?

I'd give some importance to the mechanical integrity of the housings. Grab it on either side of the keyboard a twist lightly.

Is it solid, does it creek?

How far does the display fold back? A full 180 will keep the hinges from breaking if it gets inadvertently flattened. Are the Hinges robustly designed?

Will it be easy to clean without spending time on little nooks and crannies?

I don't know how you would find out, but if the power jack is soldered direct to the motherboard, stress on the cord will eventually break the solder joint.

HP? I'm currently burnt out on that brand. I admit to there being some irrationality in that.

I would not recommend any item with one of those pivoting displays. The joints take up volume and are overly flexible.

The ASUS Eee 1215N is more of a laptop than a netbook, and it has the dreaded "Optimus" video switching hardware -- which locks you into using MS-Windows, and locks out other operating systems.

Cheers

Mark, could you tell me more about this please?

nVidia Optimus is a "hybrid" graphics system. Your laptop will have an integrated low power Intel/whatever GPU and another nVidia GPU as well. Optimus will turn on the nVidia GPU when you started doing anything which required better graphics performance and turn it back off again when you don't need it.

The problem is that without driver support, the extra nVidia GPU is completely useless as the OS won't be able to turn it on. You're forever stuck with the integrated GPU. As you may have guessed, nVidia only support Optimus on their Windows drivers and don't support it at all in any of their other OS drivers. nVidia only give you a massive binary blob as well for the Linux driver so its not particularly great.

The Open Source Nouveau driver is also unable to cope with this scheme.

Another issue is that the Nvidia GPU is usually still powered on, despite being unusable. Which really shortens battery life. There is a small trickle of code now appearing for some notebooks, to power off the dead GPU.

Cheers

Interesting, thats the opposite of how it works on a Mac with dual graphics. With both the older NVidia 9400m/9600m, and the newer Intel/NVidia 330m systems, the discreet GPU is the one that is forced on when booting into Windows or Linux.

All of this would be a non-issue (for Nouveau, at least) if Nvidia would simply tell us how to switch GPUs back and forth. But they point blank refuse to do so.

Which hurts them more than they realize.. Intel is already destroying the GPU market, by integrating their own GPUs onto the processor dies, and by restricting access to the high speed interconnects that an external GPU would need.

So "hybrid-graphics" is just a temporary glitch for Intel, until their own GPUs get good enough to replace Nvidia's. And since Nvidia isn't is actively not-helping make hybrid usable/popular for non-MS systems, they're just speeding up the death of hybrid graphics. And eventually their own demise (along with AMD's ATI division, and what's left of Matrox, etc..).

Cheers

Some (non-Apple) Hybrid notebooks also work that way. A few even have a BIOS setting to allow the owner to choose (what a concept!). But battery life is bad when running exclusively on the high-power Nvidia GPU.

-ml

Intel's integrated graphics has it's own issues under Linux.

My old VAIO has a sort of predecessor to Optimus where there is actually a physical switch which changes between the Intel integrated GPU and the nVidia GPU. You have to reboot for it to switch though.

Yeah, they're in the middle of a long term evolution to a better way of doing it all. And it's just about impossible to coordinate changes to all of the different pieces (Xorg, Linux, libs, distros, and their own driver).

My Dell X1 used to work perfectly with Google Earth. But that was with the old stuff. Now it just crawls along.. even though I know it has more than enough horsepower.

Cheers

Thats because its not using Optimus. The Mac is using the older system where there is a hardware mux that decides which GPU to use. When you're using Optimus, the integrated GPU is always on no matter what. If the nVidia GPU is turned on then it routes the output through the integrated GPU over the PCIe bus. It doesn't have a direct connection to the output at all.

Thank you for the explanations everyone.

Is this 'feature' obvious when playing around with a netbook in a shop or clearly stated in the specs, i.e. is it easy to avoid or do you take pot luck?



Awesome!

[/sarcasm]

Look for "Optimus" or "Hybrid" graphics in the marketing fluff, and/or google the specific model before purchase.

Cheers

Just to update:

I ended up buying an HP Mini 110-3538TU for under $370.

Specs include a dual-core N550 Atom, 1GB RAM, 250GB HD, Win7 Starter.

First impressions are good, the UI seems responsive enough for opening apps, web surfing, emails etc. and battery life shows over 5hrs even after a couple of hours use - although I have not run it flat yet to test the accuracy of this.

Build is solid overall but I don't think that the small cover over the Ethernet port will have a long life expectancy! Speaking of ports, the SD card slot is a very useful inclusion which comes in handy for downloading photos when travelling with a digital camera.

The screen seems sharp to me but with only 600px vertical resolution there is always going to be a lot of scrolling. The keyboard is fine for my 'hunt and peck' typing too.

Naturally, I trashed the HP 'crapware' and Norton AV trial, and am using MSE. It comes with a 'lite' version of MS Office which is adequate for anything I may want to do in terms of document/spreadsheet creation. I have installed Firefox for browsing.

Overall I am quite happy with it and could recommend it.

And a year later, it's still brilliant. We've travelled several times with it, including a month across Europe, and it's been simply excellent.

So much so, that I just splurged $75 and purchased a 1366x768 LCD to replace the factory MS-spec'd 1024x600 screen. The replacement slotted in without a hitch, was recognized by the BIOS and software, and works beautifully. Same physical screen size, but 70% more pixels than before.

Battery life is still good -- 8-9 hours on a charge, and the new screen doesn't seem to affect things one way or the other.

After my (brilliant) Samsung NC10 was stolen, I got an Asus Eee PC 1001PX. It's OK, but I preferred my old Samsung. One problem is that it only came with a 3-cell battery, so the battery life is pretty poor. Replacement batteries are expensive enough to make it not really worth bothering.

I just wish that netbooks had improved over the last 3 years. The CPUs have got a little bit quicker (but not much). There's been no increase in RAM capacity, and the screen resolution is still terrible, unless you replace the panel. While I want an Ultrabook, I don't have a grand to spend on one.



Er, bearing in mind that this is you saying this, Mark, how easy is the replacement for us soldering-inept mortals?

I actually have nVidia Optimus working pretty well on my Dell L501x with a Core i3 (Intel HD 3000 Graphics) and GeForce GT420M under Ubuntu 11.10 Oneirc with the nVidia blob drivers.

The two routes to this working is the 'Bumblebee' project which is where most of the initial work was done, contributed to by many people and then the original project owner declared as a mess. He then started a rewrite called 'Ironhide'. Read more on his blog. Anyway, seems like both Bumblebee and Ironhide seem to be in active development and mature enough to use. I am using Ironhide at the moment and it was easy enough to set up and does what it says on the tin. nVidia card disabled on boot, using the Intel HD graphics. Run an app with 'optirun <application>', and it enables the nVidia graphics for it, all works just fine, quit and it turns the card off again.

Actually quite painless.

About the same complexity as adding a second drive to an empeg.

Twelve screws, in three sets of four each.
One pry/push ribbon connector, and some gentle peeling/resticking of double-stick tape on the webcam cable.

But the panel physical dimensions and connector location do have to match the old one. In the case of my Samsung and the panel linked earlier, it's a perfect match in every respect.

Cheers

Hey, those sound exactly like the approach I suggested (nvnews forums) for this a year and a half ago. Was widely scoffed about at the time, but really it's the only good method.

Cheers

Now if only my other enhancement project were that easy.. I've soldered in a second internal PCIe slot, for eventual use with a Crystal-HD decoder board. But the slot is not working yet -- probably need to pull out the mobo and check for missing 100nF capacitors on the PCIe traces underneath or something.

Or maybe just drop the idea now that I've discovered smplayer for video playback. Seems to handle most 720p stuff just fine using only the basic netbook CPU/video. Flashplayer/youtube is still slow as a dog for HD, but local HD video files now play well enough.