Apparently netbooks are dead, after flooding the market a few years back people have almost stopped buying these small, low powered machines in favour of Tablet PCs and more productive laptops. But is there death a bit too soon – is there still life in them yet? I think there just might be…
Netbooks range in price from about £150 to over £400 (seriously if you’re spending £400 on one save your money and buy something bigger that can do more) but the truth is internally most are pretty much identical. The main differences will be in the amount of storage, or hard drive space available, and the external design/keyboard. Check before you buy if the keyboard is comfortable for you, as that and the screen are one thing you wont be able to change.
Most netbooks now come with Windows 7 Starter Edition – this is a heavily cut-down version of Windows 7 (can’t change wallpaper, limited options, max 3 open programmes) that is suited to a lower power computer, but they will have the option to upgrade online to another edition of Windows 7 – I recommend the £70 for Home Premium if you can just for the extra compatibility and versatility if you need to connect to different networks or hardware. You could always try to run Linux though – a free open source OS that is hugely popular – mainly because it’s so secure – for a machine destined to live on the net Linux is a great choice – no chance of being infected by Malware or Viruses – and you wont have to have Norton/McAfee/AVG running slowing your system down either! Linux takes a bit more setting up – I’ll cover that process soon, or there are plenty of guides online.
Sticking with Windows then there are a couple of things we can change on the Netbook to speed it up and make the experience more enjoyable. These extras shouldn’t cost much, and you’ll end up with a system thats capable of far more than you might expect.
We recently purchased a £159 E-Machines (Acer) e350 from Tesco as our Macbook Pro died after 6 years use. Another Mac will be eventually bought, but to get us by we thought we’d get the cheapest option available and see if between a Netbook and iPad we could cover our needs (but thats another blog entry…). So with cheap Netbook in hand I did the following:-
First up RAM:
Simply put the more RAM you have the more you can do, and the quicker the computer can do it. Most netbooks can take a maximum of 2GB RAM, so your first job is to head over to Crucial and order yourself a 2GB SODIMM. This should cost about £20. This is then installed into the computer replacing the 1GB stick thats there. This usually involves removing a couple of screws on the bottom, and pushing the clips either side of the RAM to pop it out. The new one goes in the same way. There are guides on the Crucial website if you’re not sure.
Reboot, and enjoy your much faster system. You can leave it there if you want. The RAM increase alone will make a huge difference to everyday usage – you can have multiple browser tabs open, and multiple apps, eg browser, Word and Picasa etc.
If you want to continue then the next step is…
The Hard Drive.
The Hard drive is where your store all your documents, music and pictures and netbooks typically come with drives around 160GB. Once formatted and with your apps installed you’re probably left with about 135GB usable space. Depending on how much you need to store you might want to change the drive for something bigger…or faster.
The faster your hard drive the quicker apps will load, the quicker documents will open and the faster your computer will boot.
For my system I was given a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB. This beast of a drive combines a huge 500GB hard drive with a 4GB Flash Memory buffer that automatically stores your most accessed files – whether its the document your working on, the web browser, or OS startup files. This gives the benefits of lightning fast memory based storage for your commonly used stuff with plenty of space on the much more economical mechanical drive for the rest of your stuff.
The procedure to replace the drive is no worse than the memory – its just unplugging one drive and putting the other one in… however you might want to clone the current drive over to save having to start again and reinstall the OS and your applications. This can be done with an external drive enclosure, and software like Carbon Copy, or again, Linux (free way to do it!)
The Seagate Momentus XT might not seem a great deal faster the first time you use it – thats because it learns your usage patterns so it learns what files to put into the Flash Memory buffer. Typically boot time is optimised after 2 or 3 restarts, but just stressing boot time is only an issue if you spend your whole day restarting your PC! far better is to use it normally and over time you’ll see your applications start faster and commonly used documents open in a flash!
With those two tweaks your system will be running far better and should easily cope with your everyday needs. Our houses our 40GB iTunes library, and pictures (over 10000 in Picasa) without any hiccups and is happy hooked up to a 21″ monitor running at 1920×1080 so there’s an easy way round the 10″ screen!
If you want to pimp your netbook (or these apply to any machine) and want some advice contact me at hGizmoDad
