Netbook Computing is it as bad as people say it is.

[bamerx98]

Well as of lately I've been watching a lot of netflix and other streaming services. The problem I have is when I first built my PC I sold my laptop that was a 15.6 Inch Acer with a i5 430m and a 5470m and 4Gb of ram, this was simply because I didn't think I wanted to have a laptop anymore because of the newly born PC as well as I needed the extra cash. 

 

So now its today March something 2014 and about a month ago I picked up my old netbook that was sitting as a "wirlesscard" for my xbox 360, network bridged the wifi to the wan port and left it plugged in and sat on top of the xbox always on. 

 

So why did I pick up the netbook for the first time in years. Well basically I wanted something that would let me get away from the basement and the computer chair let me lay on the couch and watch my favorite YouTube series or watch netflix. 

 

In 2010 I wanna say netbooks were blowing off the shelf's everyone's crazy was netbook because of there tiny form factor and great battery life with intels new atom chip inside they were faster then ever. Well at least we thought, the fact of the matter were they were not so fast. Slow HDD bogged the windows XP or Windows 7 starter on these note books many reviewers said more ram. I personally never bothered. I simply just used the machine. and then it got too slow and I got the newer full laptop.

 

But really was the netbook so bad. After coming back to it in 2014,  I feel like these were great machines. First I picked up a cheap 60Gb SSD for 40 dollars second hand. Put it in and bam, were did the sluggish machine go. Ever since the SSD has been in  the Machine i feel like if these were shipped in  the netbooks they could have really become the go to machine. The Atom N270 in my netbook is a single core with hyper threading clocked @1.6Ghz. Yes low end, but it still has some kick when you eliminated a bottleneck such as a slow hard drive some machines become true useful pieces of hardware.

 

So this is my review of the netbook 4 years later. The hardware inside is not powerful spec wise but easily can rip through the internet and only really gets bogged by microsofts flash player thing silverlight. For ever day tasks, Internet,Email Skype, teamspeak and Mircosoft office, the netbooks got more then enough power and feels fast as hell with the SSD loading things up in seconds allowing for great work flow. But can the N270 do rendering or Photoshop. First step I hocked it up to a 1080p monitor as I had cracked the screens top right edge almost 3 years ago. Once Adobes software installed. I opened it well it opened with easy starting a project again not a problem. First video file went in and bam theirs 100% usage. 10 minute clip took over 30 minutes to load peaks for audio and prepossessing. Again its a 4 year old note book I guess that's okay. Now an exported 1080p Clip @5Mbs H.264 I pulled close to 2 hour with the render finishing in 1:54:25 so not a strong suit and gaming forget it with some intel GMA onboard minecraft on the lowest settings still under 20 fps. 

 

Final thoughts. The netbook was a machine at its time 4 years down the road it can still do everything it could in the begining. Basic machine operations are quick and painless and for someone whos just doing basics why would you need more. Anything more then the basics and simply the computer is just too far in the past. for my needs as a couch internet surfing machine I really do still love it. And for my Gaming well my PC is still part of the #PCMasterRace

 

Thanks Anyone Whom Makes it Down here, Sorry for spelling and grammar its 3AM and I probably should have read it over a few more times. 

[dmacd1331]

I have to say I still use my lenovo s-10 netbook everyday. I run crunchbang on it. The only bothersum thing about it is the comments when I pull it out. "yes it is small and I like that about it" "no I dont want to bring practically a desktop around with me"

[bamerx98]

I have to say I still use my lenovo s-10 netbook everyday. I run crunchbang on it. The only bothersum thing about it is the comments when I pull it out. "yes it is small and I like that about it" "no I dont want to bring practically a desktop around with me"

There great little machines for what they can do why do you need a full sized laptop to be honest I can't think of why I need a laptop over this, when I have the desktop for the gaming and video editing and photo shop. It does the job well and hasn't let me down yet. Would it be nice to have some more power sure do I need it for the work I do on it nope. Its got enough for couch surfing and watching YouTube and TV. I only wish it had a higher resolution panel not bigger just higher res

[ZetZet]

I am very interested in those 11,6inch models now, but there aren't that many 

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/pavilionx360/overview.html

this looks promising.

[b45op]

The only thing I found that annoyed me with netbooks were the small keyboards, but it is something that comes with it. The power of the machine didn't bother me as I have always had a decent pc as my main, I mean I use a Raspberry PI in my network as a little terminal setup on my TV.

 

Once you put a decent OS on there and as you said beef it out a bit with ram and an ssd they can really fly, Crunchbang is awesome on netbooks! Well really any lightweight OS and you are golden.

[Psykomantis00]

Chromebook has replaced the netbooks in the market of today. That's a pretty clever use for a netbook though OP. Kudos. 

[TheProfosist]

People bought them because they were cheap and laptop-esk. The reason why they tanked in the US and other major first world contries it that people expected them to fill the roll of their laptop. Im guessing this was mostly based on form factor and a salesman's pitch because a netbook is not a laptop. If a netbook is used for what its intended it will succeed to this day but once used outside of it intended purpose it of couse is going to be bad. This is what many people didnt realize or at least want to admit.

Years back I tried to explain this to a girl who was trying to do photoshop work on a sub 10in netbook and complaing about the netbook. Lets just say I didnt get very far. She was also vesy unhappy she couldnt change her background in win7 starter.

Entry level tablets have now killed the netbook which in its own way is good. People still have misconceptions though. The tablet is mostly a consumption device not a creation one so for many replacing you laptop with one is not a good idea. This all depends on you use case though. The one horrible thing about tablets in general though is due to their form factor you posture when using them is just horrible. Typing this post on my phone was bad enough I cant imagine watching a movie on a tablet.

That and the previous thing are really what have kept me disinterested in tablets until recently. The new 8in windows 8 tablets that were shown off caught my eye, especially the asus with the wacom digitizer.

I was a early adoper of netbooks and still have one of the first, a ASUS Eee PC 701 ver. 1 with second ssd slot. I had that thing maxed out with a number of mods and used it for all these little things where a computer was needed but nothing to grand a portability was a big benefit.

I later got a zotac barebones netbook near the end of the netbooks mainstream life which I also maxed out and even put in a broadcom decoder card in the WWAN slot. These cards were made back then because the onboard and later on chip gpus didnt have hardware decoding and the single core single thread cpus barely had if they had enough grunt to decode 480p H.264. With that I could easily watch 576p videos and even 720p but you could tell it would struggle with 720p as the battery life was horrible and the cpu abd decoder chip areas of them physically hot.

I also always thought it was funny that high end netbooks cost as much or more than a laptop and the laptop would jyst utterly blow them away even though it wasn't great in laptop terms.

[TheProfosist]

I am very interested in those 11,6inch models now, but there aren't that many

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/pavilionx360/overview.html

this looks promising.

Asus makes a nice one that I found on newegg for some one, it has haswell i3 and a touch screen.

Chromebook has replaced the netbooks in the market of today. That's a pretty clever use for a netbook though OP. Kudos.

I personally think the tablet did. Also chromebooks really havnt been that widely adopted at all if you know what I mean.

[Legion]

I just don't see the point with all the hybrid devices out on the market now. I could never decide on a tablet or a laptop for college in the end I got a 2-1 t100. It needs to run word, compile and run basic programs, Auto rotate to portrait makes it nice for last minute debugging on the bus and it streams twitch, youtube and other entertainment. One of the guys in college asked why I bought it instead of buying a beastly laptop and I replied 1 there is no such thing and 2 my rig at home has more power and 3 the t100 has enjoyed better battery than any of my laptops.(haswell thank you for that improvement btw).

 

Anyway back on topic, tablets and hybrids do to much for so cheap I just don't see the point in netbooks anymore.

[TheProfosist]

I have my dad's old 10.1" Acer Aspire One netbook. It has a 1.6GHz single Intel Atom core and 1GB of RAM which it is not enough to even run a web browser. The only thing that it can do is playback downloaded Youtube videos for a total of 40 minutes of battery life.

Actually thats plenty of ram for browsing the web. Sounds like the battery is old and stock batteries were often 3 cell so that would explain that.

I just don't see the point with all the hybrid devices out on the market now. I could never decide on a tablet or a laptop for college in the end I got a 2-1 t100. It needs to run word, compile and run basic programs, Auto rotate to portrait makes it nice for last minute debugging on the bus and it streams twitch, youtube and other entertainment. One of the guys in college asked why I bought it instead of buying a beastly laptop and I replied 1 there is no such thing and 2 my rig at home has more power and 3 the t100 has enjoyed better battery than any of my laptops.(haswell thank you for that improvement btw).

 

Anyway back on topic, tablets and hybrids do to much for so cheap I just don't see the point in netbooks anymore.

Which is fine since the netbook no longer exists. ASUS was the last to make them, as well as being the first. I believe they stopped in the end of 2012.

[flibberdipper]

... My Eee PC 1005HA with an N270 read every last binary character of this.

[Yoinkerman]

I used the crap out of my acer netbook like 5 years ago, I used to run XP on it and XP in a vm.  I think it had 2gb of ram?  Maybe 1 or 1.5?   Either way it was plenty powerful for poking around doing stuff.  I could even play EVE: Online at the time at like 4fps.  I don't know why people hated them.