Hi

We are thinking of buying a notebook/netbook, mostly used for browsing while away in the caravan, but possibly watching the odd dvd?

battery life is not so important, and size about 10" ??

must have wireless

cost upto £250 ish

whats a good deal at the moment ?
whats the difference between a notebook and a netbook ?

Wifey would like a kindle as well, but is there an item that does all the above requirements in one bundle?

any thing else i should be asking ??

Steve

Forget the netbooks then, thay don't have built in optical drives.

Not necessarily suggesting you buy it there, but my advice would be to go to your closest large PCWorld so you can have a look/play at a large selection all at once.

If you do decide to buy there, make sure you order online and reserve in store (you can even do this instore- on their computers! lol ) as there's often a fair online discount!

Cheers,
James

Netbook is a lot handier than a Notebook or Laptop but as already posted by others you get a less screen area and no DVD/CD/BlueRay --- only a question of buying a cheap external drive.


You can get a decent 10.1" screen Netbook for £170 these days so it is a lot cheaper than a Laptop, Linux Mint runs very nicely on Netbooks.

The Other option is a Tablet computer running Android or Windows.

[Edited on 16/12/11 by britishtrident]

For simple stuff (ie not gaming etc) there are plenty of cheap laptops available, though they are bigger. Both daughters use netbooks, one samsung, one hp. Both seem to work identically, very minor differences (keyboard is a little different, and errrr, one has a slight pattern on the case....

They are great little machines, behave very well.

I recently setup an Hp netbook for a client, I didn't like the keyboard as much as the standard netbook keyboards found Azus, eMacines, Acer and the rest.

Also the Hp had some Hp bloatware that had to be disabled to make it useable.

i use an HP pavillion, its got about an 11" screen, and no cd/dvd. Its great really, and was *i think* about 240. An external drive is allegedly about £20, though ive never bothered getting one.

look on hotukdeals.com, there are often deals posted for computers.

I use a 10" toshiba netbook, no optical drive is only a minor problem, purchased a external drive that runs of the usb so no power needed, keyboard is a little flimsy, but dont bother with the laptop anymore its to big. also use a android tablet running 2.2 for when away in caravan etc.

Andy

Do yourself a favour, forget net books and just get an iPad. Seriously!

I'll be selling my older Samsung NC110 netbook soon. Probably for £100 plus postage. You'd have to wait a couple of weeks before I take a look at it and wipe the hard drive, though. Windows XP, 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB memory, 160GB hard drive, 10.6". No optical drive, but you can get an external one as suggested above.

Moving on from my shameless plug... I was happy with the netbook as something very portable. I bought it when I was driving around the country and it was good for a bit of entertainment during breaks. I used a 3G dongle for mobile broadband, which often helped when I realised how out of date my satnav maps were. It can play simple, 2D games like Plants Vs Zombies just fine but even very simple 3D games were an unplayable 10fps. I put my legally owned DVD movies on the hard drive through questionably legal means, but I won't go into that. I think the longest I used it on one charge was about 8 hours.

However, I found it didn't really hold up for more intensive uses. Typing up long documents on the small screen and small keyboard became a bit of a strain after a while. The general performance is a little laggy. You notice the difference going between a decent performing PC and the netbook when programmes take a few extra seconds to pop up. In the end I bought a proper laptop because I was going to be away from home for a long time and wanted something to play games on.



Difference between a notebook and a netbook - a notebook is a "proper" laptop, usually over 14" screen with reasonably powered hardware. A netbook is 11" and under with Atom processors (Or the AMD equivalent) meant for very low energy and low power use. Ultrabooks are a class in between, being small as well as powerful.

I put 250 down and got an ipad2 3G. Costs me £17 per month. You could get a standardipad for similar money

Just bought a 2nd Samsung Q45 notebook from the bay for £117. Works perfectly with 3+hours battery life and dual core 1.8GHz T5550, 3G ram, 320Gb hard drive, 12.1" etc...

Why buy new when there's so many 2nd hand deals around?