Black Friday 2011

Most netbooks are intended for web-surfing and basic office work (Microsoft Word, Excel, etc). They usually carry enough hardware to handle these activities, but not much beyond that. If you like to play videogames or use heftier image and video-editing programs, a netbook would either be poorly suited or completely unable to run these programs.

It is very important to make sure that a netbook has enough RAM to support the operating system it comes with. Some netbooks have Windows Vista or Windows 7 installed, but do not have the resources to run them well. A good rule of thumb for the minimum amount of RAM you'll need is:

• Windows XP or Windows 7 Starter - 1GB of RAM
• Windows Vista or Windows 7 Home - 2GB of RAM

Windows 7 Starter is a slimmed down version of Windows 7 Home, it was specifically designed with netbook and lesser-powered computers in mind.

Solid State Drives are very different from regular disks. They are often much faster, and they can also survive drops/falls that would destroy a regular hard drive. The downside is that they usually have relatively little storage capacity, sometimes as little as 8 or 16GB.

This is fine if you only want to browse around the internet and save a few hundred pictures or songs, but if you want to have a big media collection or install a lot of extra programs you'll have to attach an external hard drive to attach to your netbook, or purchase a bigger laptop.

This may seem like an obvious one at first, but be sure to consider all the features that the reduced size of a netbook can affect. Netbooks generally have smaller screens and keyboards than full-sized laptops. If you have trouble seeing or find it frustrating to type on small keyboards, you might want to opt for a full-sized notebook. [ Note: newer netbook models now offer around a 90% full-sized keyboard - Ed. ]

Netbooks may also have fewer USB and other kinds of ports. If you have an external mouse, keyboard, hard drive, or other device that you'll want to plug in to your netbook, be sure that the one you're buying has the right kinds and amounts of ports.