Netbook owners?

[ProudMarineDad]

I'd honestly hold off on buying a netbook until the holiday season at least. Being a tech whore myself, I keep pretty on top of things and there are some very cool upgrades coming. Here is a few to whet your whistle:

Better processors (some coming in early to mid 2010 though) mostly in the area of non-atom based netbooks. AMD and Intel are putting out some pretty decent ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) chips. Remember that even a Celeron processor has about twice the umph as an Atom chip at the same clock speed.

Better video cards - Keep and eye out for the ION chipset from Nvidia. It's able to do full screen HD videos and will make netbooks almost acceptable for most as a primary computing device

Any cash you spend right now on one would be wasted though, IMO.

Thanks for the info. It was going to be Black Friday before I got one any way. I have another question for you. I know that netbooks don't come with built-in disc drives but I have heard that you can hook an external one up via usb port. Is that true? I hope so because I could use it for some work out dvds that I have bought. I usually only use them for a week to see if I am doing the exercise correctly before I want to kill the instructors.

If you hear of any good deals or more juicy tips, keep them coming. I would greatly appreciate it.

[lxskllr]

You can rip video you want to watch, and put it on a thumb drive.. Optical drives generally aren't necessary for anything. With creativity and a little persistence, you can do everything with a thumb drive you did with an optical.

[ProudMarineDad]

You can rip video you want to watch, and put it on a thumb drive.. Optical drives generally aren't necessary for anything. With creativity and a little persistence, you can do everything with a thumb drive you did with an optical.

Not much creativity but have a lot of persistence so maybe there's hope for me. When I get my netbook, I will bug you guys for some pointers. Saw where Apple dropped the price on the 32g Itouch to $279 so there is another option. Probably still will go with a netbook though.

[sagedil]

Simpler solution, any external USB DVD drive works just fine.

[Ainkor]

I do want to edit my comment a bit about new netbooks. I went ahead and picked up a new one (So my wife could get my laptop as an upgrade for her :P)

I picked up the Gateway LT1300 Netbook and there are a few interesting things about it:

First, for a netbook, it kicks ass Here are the specs:

Gateway LT3103u

AMD Athlon™ 64 Single-Core Processor L110 (1.20 GHz, 512KB L2 cache, 800 MHz FSB)
11.6-inch WXGA High Definition LED back-lit display (1364 x 768 resolution and 16:9 ratio)
2048MB DDR2 SDRAM Single Channel Memory
Integrated ATI Radeon™ X1270 Graphics
250GB SATA 5400RPM Hard Drive(1)
Multi-in-1 Digital Media Card Reader
802.11b/g Wi-Fi CERTIFIED®
Integrated Web Camera
Two Built-in Stereo Speakers
Three USB 2.0 Ports
6-cell Li-ion Battery
11.26W x 7.99D x 1.03H inches
NightSky Black
Microsoft Windows Vista Basic with Service Pack 1
One-Year Standard Warranty
Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price: $399.99

I got it from Best Buy for $379 but I get the impression that they are running low on this little bad boy.

The battery lasts about 5 hours and it plays World of Warcraft :P

One interesting thing I found out is that with some tech knowledge, you will be able to upgrade the processor to the new dual core mobile processor that AMD just released.

Now, there will be newer faster ones coming out in the next 6 months but from what I've seen most of them will cost in the $500 range. For that price, unless you need the small size, get a 14 inch one and be done with it.

[desirexe]

I am typing this from my Acer that I got appx. 6 weeks ago. So far, I have no complaints and it was cheap! I refused to buy Dell because I don't want to give them anymore $$$ so they can make even lamer commercials than their "Lollipop" commercial! J/K...I read a lot of reviews and was looking for a netbook that was known to run "World of Warcraft" smoothly and this laptop seemed the best choice and was in my budget. I also did check out the Dell netbook and it may have been the display model, but the screen looked like crap! I messed around with it and couldn't get it off widescreen, so all the images looked stretched out. The associate couldn't figure it out either. Anyway..just had to chime in.

[Ainkor]

Sounds like the last Acer I bought. I walked into Best Buy and they had an Acer laptop for $349. It has a dual core intel chip (2.06 ghz), 2g ram, 250g hard drive and a nice 14in screen. It served me well till my wifes computer started taking a dump on her so that's why I got this new one.

Prices and tech have progressed so far that it's nuts. The first laptop I bought was a 486 50mhz with a big ass 10mb hard drive. It was like $2,800 about 17 years ago.