Is a Netbook for You?

By Peter Varhol

I travel eight or 10 times a year, for business or to attend conferences. As the travel starts to wear on me over the course of the year, I become increasingly conscious of the eight pounds of laptop computer and another pound or so of accessories weighing down my backpack. It sits there like a boat anchor as I wait through yet another flight delay or pull the bag out of the overhead compartment. It doesn’t kill me (I’m not that old), but it does annoy.

There’s an emerging new solution to this problem. It’s generically called the netbook, and is a low-end, minimally-configured and relatively inexpensive system that typically weighs in at just over two pounds. I priced one out at around $500 recently, which is about what you would spend for a top-end phone or a GPS unit.

A typically configured system uses the Intel Atom processor, a low-power chip that still pushes bits around fairly quickly while saving battery life. It also has 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of solid-state storage. That solid-state storage also means no rotating hard disk, so there are no hundreds of GB of disk storage. If you want more storage, you can plug in your USB flash drives (I’ve seen them as large as 128GB) and even run applications from them. There’s no DVD drive and displays are either only nine or 12 inches on the diagonal. As for the operating system, they typically run a Linux distribution or add Windows Vista Home for about $30-$40 more.

Of course, the netbook also has built-in Internet access, usually through the use of an internal IEEE 802.11g or 802.11n wireless card. You should also be able to attach a broadband card to use a cellular network for (somewhat) high-speed Internet access. The battery should also last longer than a traditional laptop’s.

What is this type of computer useful for? In addition to the operating system (Windows Vista Home, or Windows XP, require a couple of gigabytes of storage), the Windows swap file, Microsoft Office or OpenOffice (another couple of gigabytes), an email client, and a couple of other corporate-mandated applications, and you have little left for data files.

Even using USB sticks, you still have to accept the fact that your application availability and file storage will be limited. You probably won’t be able to play your favorite action computer game on this system, and if you want to watch movies, get used to hauling around an external DVD player.

But for e-mail, writing and reviewing documents,  some project planning, and other administrative activities, you might consider a netbook. I have a friend who insists that his SmartPhone will do everything he needs while traveling, but for someone who needs a keyboard and screen large enough to do writing and other detailed work, the modern cell phone doesn’t offer nearly enough capability.

A netbook almost certainly won’t run your engineering design or simulation applications. It lacks the storage, memory,  and processing power to even put a dent in your most compute-intensive problems. But solutions are on the horizon for that, too. Internet services for specific applications are starting to pop up. Software vendors are starting to let you rent their applications so that you can use specialized tools without making the commitment of tens of thousands of dollars in software licenses.

Once this model — software as a service (SaaS) —  becomes more common, we’ll be able to use less-powerful computers to both take care of administrative tasks and access the heavy-duty engineering applications we need to do our jobs. Even if you don’t travel frequently, you may appreciate the ability to run a demanding simulation at the same time you’re enjoying a latte at your local Starbucks.

Contributing Editor Peter Varhol has been involved with software developmentand systems management for many years. Send comments about this column to [email protected].