Mini Notebook

Mini notebook now is really hot in the market.Three of the popular mini notebook on the market ---> Asus Eee PC, Acer Aspire One and MSI Wind U100. Few thing you need to consider if planning to buy mini notebook is you need to know that this type of notebook is truly portable device for web browsing, office applications and video playback.

Playing game with very light graphic is nit suitable. So, if you are gamer, this class of notebook totally did not suit with you. For the performance, most of the mini notebook use an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, which is able to handle everything a mini notebook can throw at it while just sipping on the watts.

The feature you have to look are the battery life, amount of storage available, operating system and comfort of keyboard. Like Asus, the manufacturer offer a 6-cell battery standard with their mini notebook instead of the 3-cell versions found in others, giving you a running time of up to five hours and if you lower the brightness, up to a maximum of seven hours.

While storage space for mini notebooks tend to come with as little as 8GB.The 8GB isn’t a lot of storage space as the operating system already takes up about 3GB to 4GB, leaving you with little to install programs and store files.You can extend the storage by get the SD card but some memory cards tend be slower in transfer rate and certain files have to be installed in the same ­partition as the operating system.

The other thing to look out for is the operating system as the devices ship with either Windows XP or some flavour of Linux.

Both operating systems are fine if you just browsing the Web, checking e-mail messages and doing word processing because all ship with some version of Microsoft Words or OpenOffice.

However, if you are in the habit of installing programs, then Windows XP is probably a better because it’s easier to find applications that work for it than for Linux.

In fact, whether it’s Xandros Linux on some Eee PCs or the Linpus Linux that ships with the Aspire One, installing applications on Linux is an ­extremely dicey affair.

It usually requires you to know about hacks to enable third party ­software installation and even worse, Linux Terminal commands!

Lastly, you have to consider how comfortable the keyboard is — for instance, the Eee PC 901 has a ­smaller keyboard which is only suitable for people with small fingers, while the MSI Wind has a nice roomy keyboard.

Keyboard size is largely a matter of preference so we urge you to at least type a text document before committing on a purchase.

In addition, WiFi comes with all mini notebooks as standard although some, like the Eee PC, are more forward-looking and offer the latest 802.11n chipsets.(source:the star)