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A netbook is a great solution for students and business travelers. Lighter in weight than the traditional laptop, the features they all share are web browsers, common office programs such as word processing and spreadsheets, and a small photo editor. As inner city Wifi connectivity becomes more available, notebooks are a lightweight and inexpensive way to keep in touch with the office or home.

Which Netbook Extras are Worth it? Substituting the touch pad for a wireless mouse, costing about $80.00 makes it easier to browse files, the internet and eliminates wires. Since notebooks do not have an optical drive, adding programs from disks, playing music and watching videos are not possible without an external DVD drive, available for $80.00. To use that DVD player, it may be necessary to up the memory to 2G, costing around $30 and only available on notebooks with upgradeable memory card slots.

Should you buy a Laptop or a Netbook? If size matters to you, a notebook may be the best choice, as they are much smaller and lighter than laptops. Look realistically at your budget to see if the extra performance and features laptop posses are worth roughly four times the average $250.00 cost of a netbook. While the speed of 4G of Ram is nice, is that really needed on a student’s or business traveler’s portable computer?

What’s Inside your Netbook? The software, processors and web browsers in a netbook have all come under some scrutiny. Typically Windows Vista is too voracious of CPU to work on many netbooks, but an XP version was specially designed for them and works fine. Between 30G and 160G there is a lot of variety in memory sizes in netbooks, which is a huge amount compared to the early laptops. Browsers that are commonly used include Firefox and Thunderbird, Open Office and other Microsoft applications are not a problem.

Netbook Screens, A Clear Advantage? Laptop owners, like many mobile phone owners, complain about the difficulty of seeing what is on the screen in bright sunlight or strong artificial lighting. The netbooks currently on the market feature backlit screens, which offer almost perfect visibility in bright lighting. While some features, like a DVD player are missing, the makers of notebooks have added better quality items in other areas, like screen resolution and visibility. Some users who are switching over from laptops have commented that the new screens are much brighter and clearer.

Netbook or Laptop? The choice is not as simple as you might think, with the lines between each category blurring, but basically the difference comes down to memory size, speed and weight, not to mention cost. Workers needing to write reports compose letters and access spreadsheets on the road find the notebook very efficient and much lighter to carry around. Students often choose a netbook over a laptop because of because of the weight they must carry from class to class all day.

The Future of Netbooks Technology moves and changes very fast, especially in the computer market, so this year’s notebooks may seem like dinosaurs, next year. Recent models of netbook have featured 4G Ram and 320G memory, plus duo core processors, extending the possibilities for the notebooks of the future.

Matthew Kerridge is an expert in electronic consumables. If you want more information about types of netbook or are searching for a reputable laptop retailer please visit http://www.ebuyer.com