Are netbooks good?

[upapilot]

The netbooks several laptop manufacturers have launched look cute and cheap. But are they practical enough for making spreadsheets and word Documents?):P

[aysiu]

It depends on how big your fingertips are.

[Saghaulor]

I suppose it all depends on how complicated your spreadsheet is.

My brother seems to think his MSI Wind is more than enough to code C in.

From what I've seen, they run pretty well.

I mean they're not meant to be a replacement, but more of a supplement.

[magmon]

Depends on the one you buy, my dad has one he uses with work and just messing around that is amazing. Low quality built in speakers tho.

[earthpigg]

i casually IM with mine... not sure id be thrilled about documents with proper formatting and punctuation, though.

[3rdalbum]

I've got an Aspire One. The preinstalled Linpus was pretty bad and very restrictive- Acer tweaked it, and I think they did something wrong because I couldn't get the package manager working.

Eventually I installed Ubuntu on it.

The machine is great and it works very well for word processing and spreadsheets. Web surfing with Firefox is a little slow due to the weak processor (that you will find in all netbooks) but it's usable.

[maximegb]

I've got an Aspire One. The preinstalled Linpus was pretty bad and very restrictive- Acer tweaked it, and I think they did something wrong because I couldn't get the package manager working.

Eventually I installed Ubuntu on it.

I own a Aspire One, and I kept Linpus, because of the boot time (15 s). What's your boot time with Ubuntu ?

[EnGorDiaz]

i use osx on ym netbook msi wind:P

[billgoldberg]

The netbooks several laptop manufacturers have launched look cute and cheap. But are they practical enough for making spreadsheets and word Documents?):P

I'm typing this from my netbook atm.

The keyboard gets some getting used to, but I'm typing almost as fast as on a normal keyboard now.

[billgoldberg]

I've got an Aspire One. The preinstalled Linpus was pretty bad and very restrictive- Acer tweaked it, and I think they did something wrong because I couldn't get the package manager working.

Eventually I installed Ubuntu on it.

The machine is great and it works very well for word processing and spreadsheets. Web surfing with Firefox is a little slow due to the weak processor (that you will find in all netbooks) but it's usable.

You can tweak firefox to run faster (google it), but the easy solution is to just use Epiphany. It has an adblocker and uses gecko (or webkit, if you want it to).

[stefangr1]

I suppose it really depends on how demanding you are and on the budget. Most netbooks are somewhere between 200-250 euros, wich isn't a large gap in the budget for most people, but what you get is previous generation hardware. I personally consider it a gadget for entertainment/work when traveling, for people who don't want to spend a lot of money.

[Rhubarb]

I've got an eee PC S101 (10.2" screen) here.
Just remember most netbooks have 1024x600 resolution.
So it depends what apps you want to be able to use on it.
Big spreadsheets where you need to see lots of real estate would not be too pleasant on a netbook.
It really depends what you want to do with it.

I find watching videos, general browsing, irc, IM, and some games work well on my netbook.