Me? Seeking Advice? Netbooks...

[Nabobalis]

I have the Samsung NC10 right in front of me which I am typing this on. I have had the majority of netbooks come my way through work and I still swear by the Samsung for the keyboard Stick a 2gb mem stick in there and away you go. Great little lappy for what I bought it for, bought an external samsung dvd burner for it and I must say I am using it for 99% of what I do now putting the new gaming shuttle to waste, there is £900 wasted for the amount of pc gaming I seem to be doing atm.

Out of all the current netbooks I would easily say the NC10 over the rest of them for feel, quality, battery life, screen quality and keyboard. If you want I could take a few piccies and upload them if you want to see one up close without seeing the flashy marketing pics. I flattened mine and got rid of the standard xp home and all the crapware on it and stuck XP Pro on with a few tools from the Samsung disc for the likes of the touchpad with the gestures and the keyboard software to get the Fn keys working but other than that this thing flies.

Obviously at the end of the day it is a netbook but I am finding myself now hooking this thing up to the TFT and working in 1280x1024 and using it like a normal machine and its more than capable. So far I have been converting dvd's to divx and xvid files for on the go, general browsing and office work and coding in vs.net with a bit of dreamweaver and its a dream when you are at a desk with a tft to hook into. Although as you can imagine working on vs.net and dreamweaver and photoshop on the little 10.2" screen with a res of 1024x600 leaves little to be desired.

Any questions you want to ask or pictures of it, just give me a shout and I will be happy to answer them

But doesn't it start being slow/sluggish when you start converting or coding?

[Grey M@a]

Not really The extra 1GB of memory over standard helps it out and if you run it on the ac adapter with speed mode selected the netbook chugs along quite happily. If I have it on the battery I just use it like a normal laptop and I can't fault it. All you have to do is remember it's a netbook so it's not going to be blisteringly fast but it does the job on the fly.

[staffsMike]

I'm having a hard time deciding obviously. I'm not spending £300 on a netbook for my purposes, £200 - £215 is all I'm willing to drop on them. So acer/advent for me.

The problem is the Cheap notebooks which will serve me longer and better than the netbooks. I don't really need the portability.. but it might be nice..

[Grey M@a]

It's the portability that swung it for me as the amount of crap I carry around with me a normal laptop is just to big for me to carry

I love it, can just chuck it in its case with the external dvdrw and then slap that into the backpack and off I go

The only thing I have noticed that hammers the nc10 is photoshop but I use that sparingly and shift over to paint.net which is fine for most the things I do atm

[staffsMike]

Being at school it's just going to go through the odd classroom change and thats about it. For everything other than school I have my M1330, I just can't face taking it to school lol

[Grey M@a]

lol, if your budget is around £215 ish then you have the option of the advent that is 200 atm with pc world or acer seem to be chucking a few of their models out for £200ish

[staffsMike]

budget is £300 + whatever i feel is appropriate. For my needs the Sammy isn't worth it but it is very nice. I'll spend more if the laptop is useful afterwards which something like the lenovo N500 I have picked will be.. the netbooks will be as useful as each other.

[Grey M@a]

The latest use I have found for my sammy nc10 is mapping ecu's on bike's Been using it with Tech 2 also. Need to find more uses for it apart from walking around town finding unsecured wifi hotspots xD

[staffsMike]

ended up spending a little more on the MSI Wind. Got it for £250 with linux (not a problem .. i hope) in black

I spent a long time hogging that and the acer in pc world the other day and decided that the 10" screen and bigger keyboard make it much easier to use over time and easier on the eyes.

Also having read the acers can be noisey (i wouldn't be happy with that) and that the MSI isn't and runs cool it seemed the extra £35 was worth it to me.

I almost bought the lenovo and realised the samsung made more sense at that price.. so I decided to leave both and get the msi lol