What's the difference between Netbooks and notebooks?

netbooks such as acer: "aspire one" OS is running Win XP home edition and Lnux that's means can only browse website can't join domain.
Also, most of netbooks have not CD or DVD rom.
So, netbook is tiny size and easy carry on travel.

Netbook is more like a thin client that can be more controlled from a central location.

The difference between Netbooks and Notebooks is more than just in the name. Netbooks are really only good for surfing the internet, hence their name. As much money as these things cost, I recommend getting a full featured laptop instead. Even Notebooks are not as fully featured as a good laptop. Sure Netbooks and Notebooks are smaller and lighter, but consider this. That reduction in weight and size comes at a price.

Laptops have larger screens, built in DVD and in some cases, still have 3.5" floppy drives. They also have better speakers, more slots for inserting PCI cards and in some cases, better video cards for displaying graphics. Laptops also stay cooler during long computing sessions.

So, unless you plan to only use your portable computer for surfing the web, I would not get a Netbook nor a Notebook.

is a notebook small in size..so small that it has no hard drive and certainly has no cd/dvd/rw drives, drive! useful for web surfing but not much else..hence netbook

Working with computers for 30 years should make me credible here. If a laptop has a screen 10 inches or smaller, call it netbook. Some laptops have almost nothing built in (certain Macbooks) and need external hardware but they are still called notebooks. Some netbooks have all the bells and whistles but may cost. Set down what you want in a computer and then how much money you want to spend. If weight is a factor then a netbook might be the answer. However, the screens are small and you better have good eyes to read the smaller screen. I use a laptop with a 17 inch screen. Weight here is more but not that much more. My screen is big and can be clearly seen. There are also 5 plug in ports (USB). A smaller computer may only have 2 ports. Netbooks look cute but may not have the features you want.

John Cip

There are several differences. One none of these netbooks i have seen come with an optical drive. That means to load any software you'll need an external drive or will have to download it. Next you need to look at the netbooks closely and see whether they come with a hard disk drive or a solid state drive. Solid states are similar to the way flash drives work and are more resiliant but you sacrifice storage space. A solid state drive in a netbook usually are 2-16gb while a hard drive could be much more. The basic idea of a netbook is that it will be used for basic document creation, email, and internet. If this is all you will ever want it for then these are great solutions

A notebook is really a small laptop. It is usually less powerful than a desktop. A lot of netbooks are usining Intel's Atom processor which is fine for surfing the web and doing some word processing. Netbooks don't have a great deal of storage. Notebooks will have anything from 80GB to 320GB hard drives and will deal with some image editing and will play some games. If you want to surf on the go, a Netbook is fine, if you want to do a lot more and have a lot of storage, a notebook is your best bet. Hope this helps,

Curlykale

please clarify
the different between netbook and laptop

A netbook is a very compact laptop, basically. They differ from typical laptops in one or more of the following ways:

1. They often have solid state hard drives (but some have "real" hard drives). Solid state hard drives smaller than real hard drives, use far less power (longer battery life, even with smaller, lighter weight batteries) and they should be FAR more reliable (but some problems have been reported with some of them) because they have no moving parts. But they are VERY small (as small as 4GB) and they are very expensive. Some netbooks now have "real" hard drives.

2. Netbooks usually have no optical drive at all (e.g. no CD or DVD drive)

3. Netbooks usually will run a scaled down operating system, including Linux (very common) or sometimes XP, but rarely Vista.

4. Netbooks will typically have smaller screens than full size laptops.

5. Netbooks may have slower or lower power CPUs and Video than full size laptops .... the presumption being that you are just using them for E-Mail, web surfing and routine, non-intensive Office applications.

6. To keep down both the size and weight, the batteries are smaller and battery life may be short (but lower power CPUs and solid state disk drives both are ways of compensating for that).

7. Expandibility is very limited ... these are designed to do a few fairly simple task "just ok"; they are not designed to do "everything".

As long as what you want to do fits with the capabilities of the device, that's fine. But don't expect too much, and make sure that the screen, keyboard and included features meet your needs, because if they don't you are probably stuck.

Barry Watzman
Watzman@neo.rr.com

Netbooks are small laptops intended for portability and low cost. The main factor determining a netbook is the processor: a low-cost/low-power and eventually a little low performance processor such as the Intel Atom or Via C7.

Due to this factor, most tasks are limited to basic internet surfing, basic multimedia, e-mail and other basic applications. (still quite useful)

Optical drives are mostly omitted and screen sizes vary from 7" to 10" (10" being the trend with 12"s appearing)

Some are equipped with small capacity SSDs instead of a standard hard drives, especially more when equipped with Linux.

Most XP netbooks are equipped with a standard laptop HDD.

Pros compared to a regular laptop:
- Excellent portability due to small size and light weight
- Good enough for basic computer tasks
- Relatively low cost

Cons compared to a regular laptop:
- Small screen/lower resolution, small keyboard due to small size
- Limited processing power
- Hardware upgrades can be more challenging
- Due to lower processing capabilities, size and cost, advanced features are less adopted (FireWire, HDMI, etc..)

Netbooks are best used as a 2nd laptop when portability is needed (excellent for travel or leisure purposes). If you plan to do serious work with your computer, I recommend getting a standard laptop... but eventually a netbook will come in handy in many cases.

For comparison with other laptop categories, try my article:
http://www.choosenotebook.com/NotebookCategories.php

I understand that most Netbooks use a new CPU called "Atom", but although Intel's website does contain a lot of technical data about this new processor, there seems to be no comparative information about how it performs as compared with other Intel CPUs such as Celeron, Intel Pentium 4 or the dual-core breeds. It is probably fast and smooth enough for playing a video, but most likely will not perform well for video editing.

I have two laptops (HP zd8200 & Dell Inspiron 1720). I also have an Asus eeePC netbook (I assume this qualifies). Traveling with either of the larger laptops is a hassle and useless. I found that I never used the features such as the full dvd burner and great computing power I thought I would always want on the road. I only use them at home now as they equal/surpass the power of my older laptops. The Asus is by far my favorite on the road. It does what I really need to do, which is the usual check email and visit known and often used websites. Plus it never has issues with things like the angle it's at or movement while on. It has pleanty of power in the MS Works word and spreadsheets while on the road for the business I encounter. It translates well to the home laptops and is as quick as my HP. I have it running a 2g ram and the 12g hd with the 8g mmc card is plenty for storage. Plus the TSA seems to really be easier on it than the larger ones. If I want to take more than I use my portable usb 200g hd, but that has been rare. It has definitely changed my thinking about what I really need in travel computing. Your number one consideration in choosing these is your wireless connectability. For most everyone but the geek to have it all for no reason these really are the way to go.

I have never owned my own netbook, but I have researched different netbooks since October '07 and am waiting [a while] for the prices to depreciate a little bit more before I grab my own. That said, my netbook pick, value-wise, would be the Asus Eee PC 900HA (note the HA, this is important).

This particular Eee comes with a 9" screen, 160GB HDD, 1GB RAM, 1.3MP webcam, Intel Atom, and [most importantly] only costs $350. This is the best balance of features I've seen yet, with large storage, plus the added Atom processor, which saves a LOT of battery life. Also, the battery, I've heard, will last between 4-5 hours, though you should confirm this yourself with Amazon or Newegg reviews. Dell, Acer, and MSI netbook models at $350 do NOT have a long enough battery life to avoid being a substantial issue. You will have to pay more for a model with a longer-lasting battery life, usually $400 or more.

Yes, there are flaws with this model, too. The keyboard's right Shift key is to the right of the up arrow, which makes typing capital letters tedious. This can be fixed with a Registry tweak and switching the keys, so look at eeeuser.com for help if you are curious. Also, the case is glossy, so fingerprints leave a mark on the outside. However, these are just exterior flaws, and they don't affect the performance of the netbook. The 900HA is a good pick if your needs are appropriate.

I love netbooks, (actually have two); the small hard drive is no problem, as there's plenty of places on the net to store whatever you want (free), ("in the cloud"), and web-based email (yahoo, hotmail, gmail) doesn't need hard drive space.
Watch out for the problem with Linux machines - all I've seen come with a recovery disc which you will eventually need, but you'll have to use an external optical (CD/DVD) drive, and I don't know of any that will work with Linux without tricky programming. The answer is to get into an intricate maneuver on a windows machine of transferring the recovery disc to a USB stick, then plug the stick into the netbook, which, hopefully will allow booting from USB.

The difference between a notebook and a netbook is specifically form and function. It's a very cut down version of a notebook which is specifically useful for surfing, communicating, data entry(such as word pad documents) and maybe a bit of multi media.

Need to process some video footage or want to edit some photos?
Well you won't be doing it on a netbook.
My advice is if you don't need a high level of function beyond surfing, communicating and data entry all in a compact unit you can slip under your jacket, then a netbook is for you. If you're as computer reliant as most of us our however and your needs lie all across the board, I suggest you just find a relatively small laptop and save yourself the disappointment as you will find netbooks are completely limited even with the large capacity models.

The netbook's small size makes it the ideal format for taking notes in a classroom, university or otherwise. Add a USB drive and notes are easily transferred to a desktop later.

It?s funny how some people claim the limitations of netbooks are just too much to bear when just a couple of years ago an XP system with 1.6Ghz processor, 1G of ram, and an 80G hard drive would have been your DESKTOP machine! Besides, most netbooks can be upgraded to 2G of ram and many have hard drives up to 160Gigs! A loaded up netbook today would actually kick your old desktop?s butt!

XP will thrive on a system with those specs and Linux will FLY on it! I prefer XP for programs because I already own a bunch ? PLUS you can download iTunes. Since there is no DVD drive I find iTunes the best and easiest way to watch movies on the device.
Most people use computers to watch movies, surf the web, check email, and play the occasional game. Netbooks are perfect for these activities.

You want Photoshop? No problem, it will work on the device, BUT let me make a suggestion: Pick up a copy of Photoshop 6 or 7. They were developed with these specs in mind and you can get them dirt-cheap these days. I?m an artist by trade and I?ve never upgraded from Photoshop 7. Why would I? It is a very powerful piece of software that does pretty much everything most people would ever need.

Ok, the biggest problem with netbooks is that they can?t play the latest games.
BIG DEAL!
The computer gaming market is pretty much dead anyway. Video games moved to dedicated machines like the Wii and Xbox years ago ? and if you?re a gamer then you?ve already got one or both of those. You can still play hundreds ? if not thousands ? of titles from a few years ago when the computer gaming market was hot and desktops had these same specs. The best part is that these games are now in the $10 bin at WalMart.

I?ve got an Acer Aspire One with a 160G hard drive and XP. I?ve also got a flash drive with Linux Puppy. To surf the web I plug in the flash dive, boot Puppy and don?t worry about viruses, otherwise I?ve got all my programs and movies from iTunes in XP. To me it?s the best of both worlds.

A netbook could replace a laptop or notebook for many users.