What Kind of Gaming Experience Can You Expect with a Netbook?

You love computer games. You own a desktop. You are considering getting something portable so you can play away from home. You've seen netbooks and love how small and portable they are. It would be awesome to have something as small and convenient as a netbook to play games on, but what kind of a gaming experience can you reasonably expect out of one of these mini laptops?

If you're thinking you can download and play Crysis or BioShock 2 on a netbook with no problems, you're going to be severely disappointed. The vast majority of netbooks out there come with a 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor, which is definitely not going to play any current PC games.

Okay, so you can't play a game with cutting edge graphics. If you have modest expectations, you can still find some enjoyable games that will run reasonably well on a netbook. Before I get into the games that a netbook can run, let me take a look at how to get the best possible gaming experience out of your netbook.

First of all, you need to max out the memory of the netbook. Most netbooks come with 1 GB of internal memory, and some still sell with only 512 MB. The minimum requirement to run Windows XP is 64 MB with 128 MB is recommended. So if your netbook only has 512 MB, about a quarter of your computer's memory is being devoted just to run Windows smoothly. Some of the newest netbooks run on Windows 7 starter, but even this requires 1 GB of memory. So if your Windows 7 starter netbook is using up 1 GB of memory just to run the operating system, there is not much left for anything else. I recommend boosting the memory to 2 GB, which is the maximum amount of memory most netbooks support.

Graphics processing power varies widely with netbooks, but none of them have anything approaching what is needed for serious gaming. Most netbooks have what is known as "integrated graphics", which means that the graphics processing ability is built into the processor or motherboard. This allows for no upgrading, so whatever graphics capabilities your netbook comes with, that's what you're going to have for the life of the computer. However, if you can find a netbook with Nvidia ion graphics or ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200 graphics, then you've found about the best you're going to run across.

As far as a hard drive goes, bigger is obviously better if you want to hold a lot of game information. For a netbook, 320 GB should be more than sufficient. If you have the money, a solid state drive(SSD) is ideal, but these cost much more than standard drives.

Now that you have an idea of the kind of specs needed to make a netbook less anemic than most, let's look at the kind of games that you might be able to play on a netbook. As I stated earlier, most current PC games are out. A good fit for netbooks are free-to-download games and browser-based games. If you're a hardcore gamer, you're snickering about now, but decent games can be found that will run on a netbook.

Most of the games found on Facebook, such as Farmville, can be played on a netbook. A game site like GOG.com offers older games, such as Duke Nukem 3D, that were very popular during their heyday and are still very fun to play today. Even a relatively new game like Torchlight can be played on a netbook with Nvidia ion graphics. The fact that netbooks generally do not come with CD/DVD drives means that any games you play will be downloaded, but that's not a big problem since most games are offered for download now anyway.

True gaming netbooks are just beginning to emerge. The Alienware M11x is undoubtedly the top of the class, but the price is similar to equally equipped notebooks with bigger screens. AMD Athlon NeoX2 processor-based netbooks are also just beginning to appear and look promising as well, although they are still not capable of playing the latest games. Nvidia also just announced the ion 2 graphics processor, which will hopefully bring netbooks closer to becoming true gaming machines.

If you want to buy a netbook for gaming, make sure you get one with the best possible graphics processor and that you have all the memory the computer will support. Just be aware that you will be limited to older games, free-to-download or browser-based games, and a few newer games with modest system requirements.