Solved! Notebook or netbook?

[reconviperone1]

I am going back to school next week, and I need something portable to lug around. I actually was fidgeting with the dell mini 12 today, and was pretty impressed, but it's 449 dollars, now on the dell website is a inspiron with 4gb memory,dvdrw,250gb hard drive and intel hd4500 also for 449 dollars. The mini twelve has a atom n270(dont know what the hell it is, but it was running smoothly)120gb hard drive,wifi, and i think bluetooth, but no dvd-rw. I had a dell 1505 before, and i loved it but at 8 pounds(along with books) it was a bit cumbersome, the dell mini twelve has a small screen and keyboard(which didnt seem bad at the store), but how could i load programs, or get along with just 1gb memory? Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

[lostandwandering]

The Atom processors are low power, single core Intel CPUs. Netbooks aren't really designed to do much but surf the web and check e-mail so if you need to do anything intensive, you might be better off just getting a portable laptop.

With the Mini 12 you'd have to get an external DVD drive. And you wouldn't need much RAM since XP doesn't require a whole lot. Plus you won't be doing a lot of intensive stuff on this netbook, mainly because you can't.

 

[frozenlead]

If all you're going to be doing is writing papers and surfing the web, the netbook will do. If you want to listen to music and watch movies and such also, you should get a full notebook.

 

[reconviperone1]

Im basically going to use it for school, I have a accounting class, and history class, and an online nutrition class(a requirement)., so i wont be doing any heavy typing. Thing is I'm very tall, and fear my hands will be to big(although the mini twelve was surprising comfortable at microcenter) to type on the mini 12 or leaning over for long periods of time because of the smallish screen

 

[frozenlead]

The best way to combat a possible incompatibility with your hands is to do what you did - visit a store and use the machine.

You should know that the 12" netbooks are the largest in their class - 13" machines are considered notebooks.

 

[creativename]

Another consideration is whatever else you might have. I don't think I would want a netbook unless I also had a desktop or larger notebook at home. You can map the desktop/notebook dvd drive to the netbook as a network drive. Lenovo's S12 might be a little better than Dell's Mini 12 (check around), though not sure you can try it in store (i'd definitely lean to lenovo for build-quality/reliability). It's really nice carrying around a netbook, occasionally frustrating to use (I'm referring to 10" netbooks tho). Its cheap and easy to upgrade to 2gb of memory later.