I'm looking into buying a netbook (specifically this one: http://www.bestdirect.ca/products/23...-PU17-BK/ASUS/) to replace my laptop (which is now damaged and was only holding about 1 hour 15 mins of charge).

Anyway, I'm basically going to treat my Laptop like a desktop and take my netbook to campus, and to that end I have a few questions:

1) Will Windows 7 Home Premium work well with 1GB Ram and a single core 1.83GHz or should I look into Ubuntu or XP?

2) What's a decent low resource media player/manager for a netbook, I'll be using VLC for video, but I need something better than Itunes for music (Winamp?)

3) Is there any way to sync data between computers? Using Chrome Sync, Google Docs, and Dropbox should be solid for most things but for media (basically my 30GB of music, I can stream video when I need it) is there anyway to make my netbook mirror my laptop apart from manually doing so whenever I'm bored?

That should be enough to run Windows 7, but i can imagine you wont be able to do to much all at once.

As for media player by far one of the best ones is VLC. It is low on resources and plays almoust anything.

I know there are programs, norton has one, that if you have an external hd connected it will automatically mirror your laptop every now and then. Ill try and get some links/names

EDIT : Requirements for 7, 1GHz processor and 1GB ram

Not sure if this is what you're looking for but it's got a 30 day free trial so it couldn't hurt to try it out

http://www.tgrmn.com/

Before you buy that, could I suggest buying either a CULV or the Acer 521 netbook? A CULV has a bigger keyboard and screen, and the Acer is about 60-70 dollars cheaper, while having much better graphics performance (It can decode 10800, and has HDMI).

to changturkey,

CULV laptops are hard to be found in netbooks.. they are mostly in laptops with i5 and i7 processors

And Acer Aspire One 521 is not even in the market yet.. who knows how long we have to wait till it comes on the shelves

Why not just buy a new battery for like 50 bucks?

Originally Posted by maclover

to changturkey,

CULV laptops are hard to be found in netbooks.. they are mostly in laptops with i5 and i7 processors

And Acer Aspire One 521 is not even in the market yet.. who knows how long we have to wait till it comes on the shelves

http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/... 80896fe40en02

^The 521 has been in Canada for at least 3 weeks.

And you can get a Acer 1410/721 for cheap on Ebay or looking around on Shopbot.ca

Dont buy Acer -.0

Originally Posted by changturkey

Before you buy that, could I suggest buying either a CULV or the Acer 521 netbook? A CULV has a bigger keyboard and screen, and the Acer is about 60-70 dollars cheaper, while having much better graphics performance (It can decode 10800, and has HDMI).

I'm definitely not looking for a full-size laptop, I have a full-sized laptop (a decently powerful one too) and an external 1080p screen for movies and games, I don't need that on a netbook. I wanted an 11" to get a full-size keyboard, but the 93% full-size keyboard on the 10.1" should suffice. As for the Acer One (even though the price is tempting), it's exactly the same spec-wise except for running a slower processor, having a laptop GPU, and having less than half the battery life, as long as the Asus can run Chrome (with a few tabs open), MSN, and play music simultaneously, I'd rather have the 13 hour battery-life.

Originally Posted by blackdragon

Why not just buy a new battery for like 50 bucks?

My laptop never held more than about 2-2.5 hours of charge, and since I spilt milk on it: the keyboard is damaged, the it's been shutting off randomly, it's randomly been registering keys that haven't been pressed, and the hard drive apparently has errors. It would've cost some ridiculous amount to get fixed so I figured I'd just leave it at home and use it as a media server/RSS BitTorrent downloader and replace it with a netbook.

So does anybody have a suggestion for a low resource media player/manager or syncing software?

What are you trying to sync? If it's just any regular mp3 player, just use Windows Media Player, and use Foobar for playing music.

Dont buy Acer -.0

Lol I got an acer... not netbook but reg. laptop and everyone is telling me acer is bad, but I've had an acer desktop (well more like a family computer) before and now an acer laptop and no problems yet.

Originally Posted by LukeEngineer

Lol I got an acer... not netbook but reg. laptop and everyone is telling me acer is bad, but I've had an acer desktop (well more like a family computer) before and now an acer laptop and no problems yet.

I personally feel that if you know what you are doing, any laptop is going to last.

Forget getting a netbook and get a ThinkPad with a 14" screen instead. Thinkpads are amazing, lenovo has good customer service, and you have better features overall.

The only problem that I found while shopping for one was getting one that was less than 400 and had wireless-N. But if you want a laptop now then better to forgo the netbook and get a portable laptop.

Biggest reason that I dislike netbooks is intel's monopoly on the netbook processor market. If you're going to pay 300-400$ for a netbook and get 1/5 of a normal laptop's productivity that's priced at 500$ then makes no sense to get a netbook.

If after amd comes out with its line of processors's that rival intel's atom processor and its decently priced without some rubbish os, then I would buy one.