Cheap Laptops | Cheap Netbooks Blog

After covering all the topics related to laptops Im now gonna dedicate some posts to netbooks only and how you can get cheap netbooks. Also in this short introductory post i'll point out some of the basic differences between netbooks and laptops.

Netbooks, also known as mini laptops or mini notebooks have rapidly gained popularity over the past few months. And one of the main reasons for this is the addition of Hybrid support in netbooks. Before netbooks used to come with only solid state drives (SSD) so the hard drive would be either 4 GB or 8GB but now with hybrid support netbooks can support SSD drives along with conventional 2.5" 160GB or 250GB drives.

Netbooks or refurbished netbooks are smaller, inexpensive and lighter versions of their laptop versions. Some of the main differences of are:

Weight and Size: These are basically the main selling factors for netbooks, light weight and small size. All cheap netbooks have to be light and small. It is because of this they fall in the netbook category. Netbooks are very light they usually weigh around just 3 pounds. And their size is determined by their screen dimensions. Screen dimensions vary from 8.9" to 10.1". The 10.1" is more popular because it can support higher desktop resolutions.

Minimal Hardware: Netbooks are not meant to be powerful processing machines. They only have the bare minimum hardware. Just enough to get the job done or they are just enough for regular daily applications. Don't expect any netbook to support any of the latest games. Netbooks don't come with optical drives, the reason for this is that in such a small casing there is no space to fit the optical drive. There are also no internal modems or any expansion slots.

Weak Processor: Almost all netbooks come with an Intel Atom processor. This processor is very weak and is designed to handle all of the daily or regular applications such as firefox, thundebird, pidgin, etc.

Affordable: I wont say that netbooks are cheap their price tag has reached those of the budget line laptops. But for the benefits they give such as portability and longer battery life they are considered cheap and affordable.

Whether you want to buy a laptop or netbook that depends entirely on how you are going to use that machine. Will it be for heavy tasks and multi-tasking or do you want to have portability. Sadly you cant have both so you have to choose.

The Taipei Times has reported that Acer Chairman Wang Jeng-Tang has told reporters Acer’s eReader plans have been put on indefinite hold while the company looks for a way to enter the market with a successful business model, and what it calls a total business solution (one has to assume he is referring to the ecosystem that any eReader needs surrounding the hardware, such as an online bookstore, and increasingly, app store). Im sure they would be having second thoughts after apple entered the market with the iPad.

The decision was made because the eReader market is not that big, and “has yet to reach its full potential” – something I'm sure amazon will not agree with.

This all comes less than a month after the computing giant told Bloomberg that eReaders formed a large part of their strategy this year – a strategy designed to boost the companies net income. Whether after further analysis they decided an eReader wasn’t the right way to go financially, or if they are simply biding their time given the glut or readers hitting the market right now is unclear.

Fellow manufacturers and countrymen Asus show no sign of abating – their DR-570 OLED eReader and 9″ DR-950 are both still apparently on track, so obviously they share none of Acer’s concerns.