Netbooks and Notebooks... which to buy?

I was looking on the Dell site (I have a $250 gift certificate I got through a credit card special offer, so I have to get a Dell) and they offer both a netbook and a few notebooks.

My question is what people think of the $350ish netbooks with the Intel Atom processor. Are they powerful enough to do much, or will I be constantly frustrated by an underpowered cpu, small screen, etc? I'm not looking to game, but I want to be able to look at websites, check email easily, and have office apps and maybe multimedia apps (not video editing, more like listening to mp3's) without a lot of pauses and delays.

Anyone have any experience?

I'll run some form of Linux.

The ones I'm looking at are on www.dell.com/ubuntu

Mostly looking at either the netbook or the studio 15 laptop.

A few thing to consider:
Netbooks tend to have a very limited display - 1024x600 and a very small keyboard. If you haven't yet, goto a computer store that has some on display and try typing on them to see if you like it.
The netbook has no optical drive (CD/DVD rom), and limited storage 4gig.
On the studio 15 you can get 802.11n instead of just 802.11g, this option would only matter if you want to have a more 'future proof' laptop.

You should really consider what you are going to be using this computer for; if it's taking notes or casual internet browsing then it would work well, but if you want to watch movies or have a song collection it would force you to have flash drives (or SD cards) on hand.
If you want to have it for this stuff the base studio 15 laptop would be better than the maxed out netbook.

You'll get tried of 'dinky' display, keyboard and internal sd. I still love my 7" eeePC but have relegated it to 'second string' duty, for use when the short lived battery of my incredibly cheap Everex laptop dies.

does dell have an option of one without the SSD? I messed with an Acer at Best Buy that had the Atom, 1GB RAM and a 120GB HDD running XP and thought it was nice, had a 10" screen.

I then messed with one that was the same atom with 1GB Ram, 4GB SSD running Linux with a 7 screen and it was a horrid piece of crap.

What was it about the SSD you haetd? Was it locking up a lot? I'm concerned about this issue with SSD's.

MRD said:

What was it about the SSD you haetd? Was it locking up a lot? I'm concerned about this issue with SSD's.

Click to expand...

No lockups, just real small(4gb on my eeePC).

Yeah 4 is small. You can get a 32gb ssd though, which isn't bad. It's the performance that I'm worried about really. I wouldn't get a 4gb hard drive... that's just too small for anything beyond the very basics.