Looking for a netbook - any good ones around?

[Monsieur]

Daughter no:1 is asking for a netbook to help her with her GCSE exams and coursework.

Do you know of any decent ones - it needs to have wireless and ms office

Thanks

 

[bowser]

Right then a net book is the hardware and ms office is the software, to keep the cost down NO netbook is going to come with office preloaded. You can pick up a student version of Office for about £25.

Almost every laptop will now come with wireless. Be sure that a net book is what you want, they are fine, but they have small screens and doing course work is fine as long as it is word processing, but if it needs to be anthing other than that, such as dtp or excel or picture formating then it will be very limiting, there are other good deals on laptops similar prices and proper size screens, with built in CD drive for loading software.

If your are set on a netbook, Samsung produce some very good ones I have the NC10 which has been superseeded now but I rate it as a netbook and its easy to upgrade to 2 mb of ram, its robust and has been very good from a battery life point of view as well.

Steer CLEAR of ACER, they are a pain to upgrade even simple things like memory, their back up is hopless (tech support 9-4 mon to friday only).
Asus are pretty reasonable, to be honest if I were getting a new one it would be a Samsung or Asus.


Have a look here http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/

 

[GSmonkey]

Samsung N110 - look at the reviews.

 

[Kritou]

Just got a used NC10 on eBay for £191, included MS Office and 2GB of RAM - so there are some deals out there if you don't mind a secondhand machine

 

[ironandsteel]

My daughter managed to burn her laptop out during her second year at university so I got her a Samsung NC10.
I put Avast anti-virus, Open Office, CCleaner, pdfcreator, Thunderbird and Firefox on it (all free) and she managed her final year with flying colours (BSc Hons).
The only problem she had was that she had to print to .pdf to print her papers on the university system as it wouldn't print directly from Open Office.

It's still going strong so I bought my two sons one each for Christmas.

These must be the first small PC's / laptop type things that none of them have managed to break so far - maybe to do with the solid state hard drive?

They aren't fast but they keep going.

I remember some story that the Excel type software on Open Office has a bug that means it sometimes changes calcs when files are re-opened, but the word processing is fine.

I didn't go for the extra space offered for the more expensive model and it runs fast enough and stores enough to prevent any moans.

 

[Micky]

Just got a used NC10 on eBay for £191, included MS Office and 2GB of RAM - so there are some deals out there if you don't mind a secondhand machine

+1

I was recommended a Samsung NC10 on here, aint looked back. Tough as old boots and does what it says on the tin

Been overlanded to the Karakorum Highway, crashed ... and it just comes back for more

The six cell battery should be good for 5 - 6 hours of use. There are versions available with only 2 - 3 hour battery life so be aware.

Mine is carried in the lid of a Peli (top box) case and can be charged as I ride

Great bit o' kit

 

[Monsieur]

Thanks for all the advice
Now looks like I'll be going down the laptop route rather than a netbook

I've looked at dell site and may pop into pc world at the weekend as she needs one by next week

 

[STUBBS]

gone from a nc10 to a nc20 the samsungs are great machines

 

[Invicta Moto]

We're testing a small batch of Compaq Mini 110's. They seem pretty sturdy and fit in a handbag without too much fuss. The keyboard is better than most of the crap that comes with smaller machines.

The idea is to get them as cheaper and more portable machines for teacher and TA's to use in schools. Our usual Tosh Satellite Pro's and Dell's are too bloody heavy to carry around.

Reasonable processor and a 160gb hard drive. on eBuyer they are less than £200 inc vat etc.

Although we have Office licences for around a 1000 users, we have installed Open Office as it is free and bloody good.

 

[ExpatinIstanbul]

We're testing a small batch of Compaq Mini 110's. They seem pretty sturdy and fit in a handbag without too much fuss. The keyboard is better than most of the crap that comes with smaller machines.

The idea is to get them as cheaper and more portable machines for teacher and TA's to use in schools. Our usual Tosh Satellite Pro's and Dell's are too bloody heavy to carry around.

Reasonable processor and a 160gb hard drive. on eBuyer they are less than £200 inc vat etc.

Although we have Office licences for around a 1000 users, we have installed Open Office as it is free and bloody good.

Can you recommend a good handbag?

Solid State Drives. I've been considering a netbook as I expect to do a lot of traveling this year, and although my XPS M1330 is good and light I'm thinking that a netbook would be even better from a lugging around point of view. But, what's the deal with SSDs? I'm told they are lighter, use less power, are more stable and don't cause heating....is this right?

 

[Pondboy]

Expat,
Yup, and they have much faster read/write speeds. So load your o/s & applications on it for quicker load times.
Downer is they are a bit pricey. PB

 

[joness7]

Dell Mini 10v with Apple OS X

I just got a Dell Mini 10v and loaded Apple OS X Snow Leopard on it and MS Office for Mac. Best of both worlds.

Seemed quite slow when I initially bought the laptop and fired up windows 7 on it, but no issues with SL.

 

[Pauly S]

asus eepc901

Double chuffed,plenty of upgrades,solid state drives,3 usbs,6 hr battery,wifi,bluetooth,upgradeable memory,Lan,ext monitor,and you can charge it with 12 volts.
buy it from orange and it comes with modem built in.
well pleased with mine.

 

[Kritou]

.......... Mine is carried in the lid of a Peli (top box) case and can be charged as I ride ..........

How exactly do you do that?

 

[Invicta Moto]

Can you recommend a good handbag?

It has to be large with space for all the shite that women need every day. Two of the Compaq's went on a "business" trip to the US this week... I hope they enioy meetinfg Mrs Obama.

As for their performance. The buggers fire up quickly. We have XP on ours as the corporate IT support won't touch Windows 7 for years yet until the problems are part ironed out.

 

[digga]

we have installed Open Office as it is free and bloody good.

Just love the way i can export as .pdf with no faffing about ..... brill


** noticed a 2 NEW NC10 in the local FastCash place ..... £210

 

[Deleted account W]

This looks like a decent spec for the price

 

[John Armstrong]

Just got a Samsung N150 for £279. Cracking bit of kit, and the screen is matt so when the sun shines, you can still see it ok.

 

[Meadowman]

+1 FOR THE sAMSUNG N150 @ £279.00

 

[ovenpaa]

Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 here and very impressed, we have run Thinkpads for years at home and the Lenovo badged version seems every bit as robust as the IBM's before.

It is only used when we need a Windows operating system to run apps that are not available for Linux and it is perfect for our needs

They are available for sub GBP230.