I use my Asus EEE 901 with 12Gb for flash storage (no hard drive!) and 2Gb of memory for all my computing needs. Here’s a list of things you can do with a netbook, and things you can’t, drawn from my own experiences. I run Windows XP SP3.
You can be pretty sure this list applies to all netbooks. The fact that mine doesn’t have a hard drive of +100 Gb doesn’t seem to make a difference. Keep in mind that most notebooks have a 1024×600 screen resolution and that this may impact your user experience for certain applications.
Things you can do:
- Web surfing: I use Google Chrome, but I did disable caching. With caching enabled the web surfing was very slow.
- Watching videos online: I did set up a 500Mb RAM driver for temporary file storage, otherwise videos wouldn’t play smoothly.
- Office applications: I use Open Office, but I know from experience that Microsoft Office 2007 runs pretty smooth as well.
- FTP uploading and downloading: I use FileZilla.
- Web development with LAMP: I use XAMPP Lite.
- Java development: I use Java 5 and Eclipse 3.3.
- Skype: the audio quality is just as good as on any other computer, the built-in webcam works very well.
- Skype call recording: I use PrettyMay Call Recorder for Skype.
- LiveStation.
- Kaspersky Anti-Virus.
- Windows Live Writer.
- Screencast recording: I use Cam Studio Portable and the Cam Studio Lossless codec. I do use an external hard drive for recording screen casts. I did follow these configuration instructions, otherwise recording quality was not good. These settings produce very good results.
- Video encoding: I use the MEncoder utility that comes with MPlayer. I also use the external hard drive for this.
Things you can’t do:
- Itunes: it just doesn’t want to install properly on my netbook, I don’t know why.
- Inkscape: the Atom CPU is not powerful enough.
- TweetDeck: it works but it uses so much memory, it’s unbearable.
I’m very happy with my little netbook, I can recommend them to anyone. They’re also pretty powerful and versatile although they’re not as powerful as proper notebooks. But they’re much smaller and much lighters, making them easy to carry and use. Their keyboard is also smaller, my keyboard is 92% of the size of a proper notebook keyboard. I have to say that without the upgrade to 2Gb RAM my netbook wouldn’ have been as versatile as it is now.
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