Netbooks- Signaling the End of Notebooks

Netbooks are small sized computers, smaller than the notebooks with a screen that sports a width which is as low as seven inches and weighs about three pounds or lesser. These netbooks have become the most favored computers to be bought in the past year not surprisingly. I myself have got a netbook, fed up with carrying around my laptop which weighs around six pounds and is a real pain in the back literally for me. Many people are choosing the netbooks over the laptops like me and here is what I have found about the rising popularity of netbooks.

Laptops though they are supposed to be portable are too heavy to carry around whether in the backpack or in a side bag. Many times I've felt the weight impossible to handle that too when there were other things beside the laptop to carry. Though lighter versions keep coming up in the market they are I'm afraid a bit on the heavier side and it's very difficult to carry them to and fro from home to office.

I then got a netbook an Acer Aspire with a fairly large sized keyboard. It is very useful for fast touch typists and since I too belong to that group the netbook was a real treasure to me. The size of the keyboard was only a few sizes short than the normal keyboard and is very easy to type fast once you get used to the small size of the netbook.

Screen size is another factor to be considered. The netbooks are available at seven inches onwards and though this is too small I have found it easier to work with by increasing the font size to as high as 150 plus percentage. This way even a small screen would not be a hindrance and with a netbook of ten inches you will feel almost no difference at all.

The available storage area and the type of storage are also important when you consider a netbook. There are netbooks that come with solid state drives instead of hard disks. This is more favorable as the solid state drives are light weight and do not have any mobile parts and hence are not breakable. The spaces available for storage in the earlier versions were as low as two to eight gigabytes. The use of USB memory or SD storage cards to give extra space for the memory is a good alternative to circumvent the storage problem. Though I was not comfortable with the very small storage space when I heard about the new Aspire series in Acer which promises a 120mb hard drive which is more than enough to work with, I instantly got one.

The main factor that tilts the scales in favor of netbooks is the speed of performance. The netbook that I have comes with an Intel Atom chip and I have installed windows XP in it. It has one gigabytes of RAM and this is sufficient enough to do most of my work which needs photo editing software, web editing tools and even word processing software. Almost 50% of people using the computer find this good enough to do most of their work.

A netbook is not equipped with a CD drive and with the advent of memory sticks and SD cards, you most probably do not need a CD drive! If you are particular about it then you can get a portable drive or install the required software through downloads. Anyway you look at it; the netbook is the newest addition to your workplace and is rapidly replacing laptops with its low prices, lighter weight and good performance.