Searching for the perfect Netbook

Dan Ackerman, Senior Editor April 1, 2009

With low-power processors, tiny screens, and finger-cramping keyboards, Netbooks aren't good for much more than surfing the Web, checking e-mail, working on office documents, and maybe a little light multimedia playback--but that's still 90 percent of what we do with our laptops anyway.

The problem is that consumers who may very well be interested in a Netbook as a second or travel laptop are confused by the different components, prices, and even operating systems available.

To our surprise, we found that none of these Netbooks hit all the benchmarks we were looking for--some were underpowered, some had terrible batteries, and others simply cost too much for what should be almost an impulse purchase.

The Eee PC 901 hits most of the marks, and we love its extended battery life, but at $600, it's just as expensive as a comparable 15-inch budget laptop. The Eee PC 1000 is even more expensive, thanks to its best feature, a 40GB SSD drive, but again, excellent battery life, topping five hours.

Acer's Aspire One is great-looking Netbook, and at $379, it's also one of the cheapest. But by saving a few bucks, you have to accept a measly 512MB of RAM and a battery that lasts only about two hours. It also has a Linux operating system instead of Windows XP. While that certainly has its advantages (cheaper, runs well with less RAM), we generally prefer Windows XP in our Netbooks--it's more familiar to people, and makes it easier to install new software or troubleshoot problems.

The MSI Wind came close to fulfilling our Netbook dreams, but we'd rather have a smaller SSD drive (for less weight, better battery life, and hopefully more reliability, thanks to its lack of moving parts), than an 80GB standard platter drive. Also, at less than two hours, this is one of the worst batteries we've seen on anything besides a massive desktop replacement.

The Sylvania G Netbook has some decent component choices, but it was totally undone by a tiny 7-inch screen, virtually unusable touch pad, and a sluggish older VIA processor (we're still waiting to see something with VIA's new Nano Netbook CPU, which has been garnering some positive buzz).