Ask someone to design their dream desktop and they'll fulfil your wish in seconds. Picking components that are fast, silent and cheap is as easy as machine-gunning fish fingers in a barrel these days.

Try to figure out what laptop you want to buy, though, and it's more like trying to stun a tadpole with a feather duster. Whichever compromised combination of size, style, battery life, screen quality, processing power and – of course – price you eventually hammer down as a shopping list, the only way you'll know if you got it right is if you're still happy with your new purchase in, say, a year's time.

The right notebook will be the best PC you'll ever own. The wrong one will make your life a living hell of broken drivers, slow boot times, shoddy picture quality and a battery that runs flat before you can get it out of the door.

Follow our advice, though, and there's no reason to be saddled with a stinker.

You can't start talking about laptops without bringing netbooks into the conversation early on. In the same way that portables have caught up with, and are now outselling, desktop PCs, netbooks are the ghost of Christmas future come to show the manufacturers what their fate will be.

Just over a year ago, netbooks didn't exist. Now one in every ten PCs sold in Europe is an Eee PC or rival. By 2010, over 50 million a year will be manufactured. AMD doesn't make netbook CPUs, and its market share is destined to drop into single figure percentage points next year as a result. Taiwan sold out of suitable netbook batteries for a large chunk of the summer, and every single PC manufacturer is playing a rapid game of catch-up with Asus.

Cheap netbooks

Apparently, the birth of the netbook has given us all some greater self awareness of what we want from a portable PC. Forget a miniature office or portable games centre: small and cheap is all that really matters. Who cares if a keyboard is impossible to type on if you can do all the important stuff, like read your blogroll, while lounging about in a coffeeshop for six hours on a machine that costs less than £250?

That said, we challenge anyone not to lose their heart to Asus' ridiculously well built Asus Eee S101 – the designer netbook – even though they know in their head that it's exactly the same as one half the price.

The problem is that – S101 aside – there's not a lot to distinguish one netbook from the other. There's two screen sizes – 8.9-inch or 10-inch – to choose from, and some have a better battery life than others, but beyond that the only distinguishing marks are hard drive size – everything else is cosmetic.

CPU, RAM, graphics, video output and screen resolutions are all practically the same. Every netbook worth buying is essentially identical under the skin.

Just one thing on differences: if anyone is considering spending more on a netbook running XP over a Linux-based alternative from the same stable, they shouldn't be allowed near crayons, let alone a computer.

What's next for netbooks?

So what's next for netbooks? Bigger, cheaper, faster, more efficient solid state storage drives are on their way, though we suspect that spinning-platter technology will remain a more cost-effective option for some time yet.

There's a lot of talk about dual-core netbooks arriving within a year, using the next iteration of Intel's Atom processor, Dual Diamondville. With almost four times the TDP of the current Atom N270, though, we're slightly sceptical that it will dislodge the current champ.

Via's Nano, meanwhile, has yet to be placed inside a single available netbook. Potentially faster than Atom-based systems, Nano – like Dual Diamondville – has a thermal requirement that isn't particularly suited to super small form factors with mostly passive cooling.

AMD continues to have a blind eye when it comes to netbooks, which means the next big thing is still Intel's Moorestown platform. That's the system-on-a-chip everyone's talking about, which promises to be crazily power efficient because everything – memory controller and GPU – is integrated on to the CPU die.

Our only reservation at the moment is price: the existing Atom chips are scheduled for a die-shrink to 32nm in the new year, and we just can't see the first Moorestown netbooks being cheaper than the next Atom-based ones.