The ultimate guide to buying a netbook

Netbooks have exploded onto the market. And apparently it was a surprise to everyone in the computing industry that Joe Public fell in love with them. Oddly, it seemed we weren't interested in investing the monetary equivalent of a luxury Mauritius holiday in buying a steel box of components that connects to the internet and goes beep occasionally.

So in this age with a multiheaded credit-crunching beast roaming the land, netbooks are the perfect low-cost addition to any household. No matter if it's a third system for yourself or the portable that jam-covered little Jimmy has been asking for all of this time.

If you're not familiar with this fast moving new market segment, the technologies and options out there can be bewildering. Don't worry though, whether you are planning to buy a netbook as a cheap Christmas gift for yourself or a friend, we'll be covering all the essentials right here...

Designed for essentials

The original Asus Eee PC 701 was the machine that many consider to have kicked off the whole netbook gold rush. It was designed to provide a low-cost system. And a low price means cutting costs at every stage; a smaller screen, chassis and keyboard coupled with low-power processor and free OS. These all help make an able but frugal system that even Mr Scrooge would be proud of.

But a netbook is not a laptop.

When first considering a netbook it's this frugal design that you need to be aware of. There's a sickly marketing catchphrase that's bound to make you gag as it comes out - which goes: "netbooks are for viewing, not for doing".

This is to say they're great for email, web browsing, 'light' document editing, plus photo, music and SD movie enjoyment. However, the small physical screen and resolution size makes editing photos and complex documents difficult, while anything that requires 3D or CPU muscle is out of the question - so if that puts you off, you might be better off considering a full laptop instead.

Indeed, while £299 seems a perfectly reasonable amount to pay for a netbook, the decreasing prices of full-blown laptops mean that if you want a system for home or use on the move, you may be better off with a bigger and more capable system.

Better battery life

Budget processors always have the tendency to be part of an ageing generation that's been put out to pasture with the larger parts of their faculties lobotomised off.

The original Eee PC ran an Intel Celeron M; based on the classic Pentium-M architecture it offered reasonable processing power even at the very low clock rates the Eee PC uses; a mere 5 Watts.

The newer version is the polar opposite in design terms; freshly built from the ground up. When Intel came up with the Atom platform it had handheld internet devices in mind, so when Asus started dropping them into low-cost sub-laptops and we started buying them, the rest of the world took notice.

It's interesting to compare the performance of the 1.6GHz Atom N270 that lives in many netbooks to the far older 600MHz Celeron M certain models use. Under testing they run about the same speed but key to Atom's design is its ultra-low 2.5 Watt power output. Coupled with advanced sleep states it's perfect for maximising battery life in these cheap devices.

Less common, but used in the HP Mini-Note, is the VIA C7-M range of processors. Similar to the Atom, it's an in-order processor, so lacks a lot of the processing grunt you'd expect from a similarly clocked processor.