Netbooks. Notebooks. Macs. (Part 1)
March 14, 2010
(This guide is highly opinionated.)
Netbooks
Netbooks has grown in popularity over the few years that it has been present in the technological community. It has been a big hit among students and people with average computing demands. Please do take note that i wrote AVERAGE. It should be low but seeing that more and more people are now getting satisfied with the less than powerful abilities of netbooks, i’d say that the general public’s computing demands lessened.
Acer's Aspire One 751h surprised the crowd with its 1366x768 resolution, surpassing the normal 1024x600. What surprised the crowd more, though, was the below-average Intel Atom Z520 1.3GHz processor. It was reported that the 751h performs well only in internet surfing but is sluggish when doing even normal everyday tasks.
Netbooks, in general, are notebooks with low processing abilities and longer battery life, just enough for average internet use and the occasional word processing stuff. They are physically designed to be as small as possible (which is the reason why there’s no optical drive) thus making it more portable. They should not be compared with their superior brothers when it comes to speed. Netbooks are shipped with their own kind of processors (with Intel Atom dominating the scene) and chipsets. These processors, which usually ranges from 1.4-1.66GHz, are designed to have the most processing power as possible without risking the battery life.
The 2G Surf was the first ever netbook. It sports a 800x600 screen resolution, Intel Celeron M processor, 512MB Ram, and 2GB SSD. Its battery only lasts for 2.8 hours.
The first company to officially manufacture netbooks was Asus, though there were reports about Psion releasing a line of laptops called NetBooks in late 1998. They started with 800×600 screen resolution. That increased later on to 1024×600. Later models include 1366×768 displays allowing more working space. I don’t know about other users but I prefer having 1366×768. I’m currently using 1280×800 and i’m feeling pretty cramped. they say that 1366×768 is not a “netbook standard” because anything bigger than 1280×800 is considered HD.
This one is slowly becoming a crowd favorite. It has an Intel Atom 330 processor bundled with Nvidia Ion thus producing superb graphics. The only downside is the battery life though. It's other 1201 brothers were able to stay up to 8 hours while the N only lasts for 5.
The first netbooks included Intel Celeron processors which were not very good with power management. This led to the production of the Intel Atom line of processors. The first one was the Intel Atom N270 which is a favorite of major brands up to now. Later N280, an updated N270, was released. A big downfall of Intel’s netbook processors career was the release of the Z520, running at 1.3GHz. This was compensated by the Z530 at 1.6GHz. Now, the Intel Atom 330 is making quite a fuss. Bundled with Nvidia Ion, it produces superb graphics comparable to notebooks.
