Mini-notebooks are affordable and very convenient; for the price of a large mp3 player you could purchase a full computer. Prices range from about $279 to $499. They are smaller than any textbook and can carry more information than any book; with internet connectivity, information is infinite (well almost infinite). What do you look for in a mini-notebook aside from price?

The only flaws that I have noticed with mini-notebooks are the speed, battery and hard drive sizes. Some models come with a solid state hard drive that improves performance, but size is very limited (8gb does not go very far after a couple of simple applications are installed). The larger hard drives are slightly slower, but their drawback is power consumption. Considering that mini-notebooks only have mini-batteries, portability becomes diminished if battery life is too short. On a regular sized notebook you usually have a choice of 6 or 12 cell batteries, some minis only give you an option of 3 cells. A larger battery would make the unit bulkier, but why not make it optional? Mini notebooks are slower; therefore they are equipped with older operating systems. The older operating systems help with the speed issue, but your several hundred dollar investment will become obsolete much quicker.

Mini-notebooks come without a CD/DVD drive. This is a plus when it comes to portability, but a downside for playing movies. I transfer everything by USB flash or external drives anyway, so I do not see this as a problem, but a road trip would be easier if a DVD could be inserted. Most external DVD players are not portable.

If you intend to install applications such as video editing or large format photo editing, then DO NOT purchase a mini-notebook; the RAM and CPU speed is too slow for these tasks. The smaller hard drives are also not designed to handle large video and mp3 folders. The 160 GB hard drive should be sufficient for serving all your mp3 needs and a few video files.

If you get the smaller, quicker solid state hard drive, make sure that you have at least 16 GB. Ram should be a minimum of 1 GB (two GB would be nicer, but usually not available). Always get the largest battery that you can get because these computers are designed for portability (6 to 8 cells would be nice, but I have not found any yet). Your operating system should be Windows XP with the latest service pack or one of the latest Linux distributions. Do not upgrade the OS to Vista unless you have at least 2 GB of Ram and one of the larger hard drives (larger as in over 80 GB). Consider having video compression software on your desktop so the mini-notebook can have a few videos to watch, especially on a road trip (use your desktop to compress the video file first).

Most electronic stores will have a display model that you can try out. Test drive it and see if you are comfortable with the mini-keyboard. If the computer is for a child, then the smaller keyboard is not an issue.