Netbooks vs notebooks: which should you buy?

Do you need it for work?

Of course, as well as sending emails, updating your Facebook page and watching TV on the web, most of us have to use our laptops for boring work stuff from time to time. In this regard the netbooks on the market today equip themselves pretty well.

Instead of Microsoft Office, the majority come with one of the less expensive or free alternatives, such as Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect Office or Microsoft Works. While both Star Office and Word Perfect Office take a while to adjust to, they have much of the same functionality as Microsoft Office and are mostly compatible with Office file types so you should have no problems opening, editing and saving documents sent to you by work colleagues.

Although the small keyboards and screens on models like the smaller Eee PCs and Acer Aspire One make it a bit of a chore to work on long documents, this isn't such a problem on larger machines like the Eee PC 1000 and MSI Wind.

Speed-wise, we didn't experience many problems when working on Word, Excel or PowerPoint files on a variety of netbooks. File opening and saving times were fairly nippy and even cutting and pasting large images or lots of tables and graphs didn't slow things down too much. However, if you keep a lot of documents open at the same time and are constantly switching between them, it can place a strain on a netbook's limited spec.

This is mainly because netbooks tend to come with a limited amount of memory, but it's also due to the nature of the Atom processor, which isn't a patch on the dual-core and quadcore processors found in full-blown laptops when it comes to multi-tasking.

On the whole, we'd say that for day-to-day office tasks, netbooks have enough processing power to get the job done without feeling too sluggish.

Do you need to edit photos and video?

With digital cameras and camera phones so prevalent today, at some stage most of us will need to do a bit of photo editing and cataloguing. Using Google's Picasa software on both the Linux version of the Eee PC 1000 and a Medion Mini E1210 running Windows XP, everyday jobs like resizing pictures, rotating them and doing simple touch-up tasks were performed relatively quickly, although not quite as speedily as on a standard laptop.

However, when it comes to dealing with video, things aren't so rosy. Obviously video encoding is becoming increasingly important as most of us want to be able to re-encode videos to play on portable devices like the Apple iPod and Sony PSP. As a result, Intel has spent a great deal of time optimising its desktop and laptop processors for video encoding and decoding. However, lots of these tweaks have been removed from the Atom in order to keep its power drain to a minimum.

The effects of this were plain to see in our tests. Converting a 100MB high-definition (HD) trailer from WMV format to DivX format took a whopping 9 minutes and 20 seconds on a Medion E1210, which uses the 1.6GHz Atom N270 chip that's found in most of today's netbooks.

In comparison, the same job took just 2 minutes and 29 seconds on a Dell Vostro laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 clocked at 2.10GHz. These results make it clear that if you plan to use a netbook for video editing, encoding and other such intensive jobs, then you'll have to be prepared for a lot of waiting around.

Despite these performance issues, there is one major area where netbooks score highly: portability. A few years ago, a sub-notebook from the likes of Toshiba or Sony would typically cost two grand and still weigh well over 2kg. netbooks have swapped that equation – the cheapest models are actually the smallest.

In part this is because the most expensive component of a netbook is its screen, and so the smaller it is, the lower the price of the product. In fact, the smallest netbooks are now so tiny they'll slide effortless into a larger handbag, and they typically weigh less than 1kg.

Another advantage is that there are a large number of netbooks around that use SSD drives instead of hard drives. SSD drives store data in solid state memory, so there are no moving parts. This means that they're less prone to damage if they get knocked about.

Do you want to play games?

At a time when some laptops are starting to rival desktop machines in terms of gaming performance, the current crop of netbooks fall woefully short when it comes to gaming prowess.

The latest laptops come with dedicated graphics chips that help them produce stunning frame rates and amazing graphics in the latest and most demanding games. And while these represent the pinnacle of mobile gaming performance, even the cheapest and most basic notebooks have enough power to play slightly older titles at a decent frame rate.

However, the same can't be said for netbooks. Any 3D game that requires relatively demanding graphics – even titles that are a two or three years old – run so slowly as to be unplayable and some titles just don't work at all. For example, we tried the Crysis demo on the Medion E1210, but it refused to run, announcing that it wasn't compatible with the Mobile Intel 945 chipset.

Nevertheless, you will be able to play some ageing classics. The original version of Half Life worked without any problems, as did Halo I, although you'll need a USB optical drive to be able to install both titles. Still, it's clear that if you're a gamer and you want to be able to play titles created in the last four years or so, then a netbook will not provide sufficient power to even scratch your itchy trigger finger.

Should you opt for a Linux or Windows netbook?

The early netbooks, such as the original Eee PC, were all about price. To keep the price as low as possible, they came loaded with the Linux operating system rather than Windows XP.

Linux is an open source OS and therefore completely free. In contrast, Windows is obviously owned by Microsoft and it charges licensing fees for manufacturers to load it on their netbooks. Originally this fee was prohibitive, given the sub-£250 price of the early devices, but to make it more palatable Microsoft has since reduced the fee to around £20 and XP has become the de facto OS for netbooks.

A small number of netbooks are still available with Linux pre-installed and Linux actually has a number of benefits over Windows when used on netbooks. For one thing, it boots up much faster. On an Eee PC 1000 loaded with Linux the machine booted to the desktop in just 25 seconds. In comparison, a Medion loaded with Windows XP took just under 50 seconds.

Also, because the Eee PC stores the entire OS on its drive, if anything goes wrong it can be quickly restored just by restarting the machine, holding down F9 and then selecting System Restore. The whole process takes under a minute.

However, Linux is not without its issues. We've had problems with the Wi-Fi configuration tool on both an Eee PC 701 and 1000, randomly losing settings and refusing to connect to our router. Also the Linux version of Flash doesn't handle video as smoothly as the Windows version.

So, for example, although we could play video from the BBC iPlayer (which uses a Flash-based video player) in full-screen mode on an Asus E1000 running Windows XP, trying to do the same thing on the Linux version of the same netbook results in jerky video.

If you're already familiar with Windows XP (and let's face it most people are), then it may be the better option. You can run all the applications you can on a full notebook or desktop PC and you don't have to get used to new ways of doing things, as you do when you switch to Linux.

Nevertheless, Windows does have some drawbacks. It takes up more disk space, which can be an issue on machines with SSD drives, and it also places a higher stress on a netbook's processor, especially when running multiple apps at the same time (like having a virus scan running in the background while browsing the web). You'll also need to add some additional software, such as anti-virus protection, although this can be downloaded for free from avg.com or avast.com.

So, should you go for a netbook or a notebook?

There's no doubt that netbooks are an exciting addition to the world of mobile computing. However, we wouldn't really recommend a netbook as your sole computer unless you're a fairly undemanding PC user.

For more intensive tasks, you'll find that a netbook's limited performance really gets in the way. However, as a companion for your existing laptop or desktop PC, a netbook is hard to beat. They're highly portable and the good battery life is also a boon. Add to this the fact that they're so competitively priced and you've got a really tempting device.

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First published in What Laptop, Issue 118

Liked this? Then check out Why Windows is winning the netbook war

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