Top 10 Netbooks 2016

Generally laptops are just too heavy to carry around with you. With a good netbook you will be in touch with your office and home wherever you might go.

Netbooks have recently dropped in price and improved in power, dramatically so. Having said that if you want to play games or edit video or music a netbook is not for you. They simply don't have the power for that. If however you want to web browse, do a little work, maybe video chat, and do all of this on the go, then a netbook is a great solution for you.

In top 10 netbooks 2016 we will look at the top 10 new netbooks, discuss what you should look for in a netbook and then do a comparative review of our top 2 netbook picks.

1. ASUS Eee PC 1015PED-PU17-BK
2. Acer Aspire One AOD255-2691
3. Toshiba Mini NB255-N245
4. Toshiba Mini NB305-N440BL
5. ASUS Eee PC 1000HE
6. HP Mini 210-1084NR
7. Samsung N120-12GW
8. Samsung GO N310-13GB
9. Lenovo S10-3t 0651-37U
10. Dell Inspiron iM1012-687OBK

• Memory: Get one with 1 GB of memory or more.
• Chip: Netbooks use CPU's that consumes little power. The most popular chip is currently the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom.
• Disk Drive: PCs use hard drives with moving parts. This isn't a good solution for a netbook because they get dropped and that can break a hard drive. The best solution for a netbook is a solid state drive like the ones in a USB drive.
• OS: Your options are XP or Windows 7. Vista never really worked well with netbooks. With the newer more powerful netbooks I would recommend getting Windows 7.
  
• Battery Life: Because netbooks are smaller than laptops their batteries tend to last longer than a laptop's ones. Don't consider anything under 3 hours.
• Keyboard size and spacing: Many of the new netbooks have keyboards that are 90% the size of a standard laptop keyboard. However if you have chubby fingers, like me, you should take a close look at both the size and the spacing on the keyboards.
• Size and weight: These vary between netbooks. Remember you are going to be carrying this item around with you. Weight varies between 2 and 4 pounds.
• Ports: A netbook should have a VGA port to connect it to a screen and 2 or more USB flash drive.
• Wi-Fi and megabit LAN are standard with these mini laptops. Newer netbooks come with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Chip: 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N450 processor
Memory: 1 GB, Upgradeable to 2GB
Battery Life: 4 hours
Disk Drive: 250 GB not solid state
Weight: 2.43 LBS
OS: Windows 7 Starter
Keyboard size: 89% of standard laptop
Input and Output:1 x VGA connector, 3 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x LAN, Headphone and Microphone ports
Warranty: 1 year
Integrated webcam and microphone

Chip: Intel Atom N475 processor, 1.83 GHz
Memory: 1 GB, Upgradeable to 2GB
Battery Life: 13 hours
Disk Drive: 250 GB - Free 500 GB online storage
Weight: 2.76 LBS
OS: Windows 7 Starter
Keyboard size: 92% of standard laptop
Input and Output:1 x VGA connector, 3 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x LAN, 2 x audio jacks: Headphone & Mic-in
Warranty: 1 year
Integrated webcam and microphone

Looking at the prices the Acer is the budget option while the Asus is definitely a premium netbook. If you buy from Amazon, just look at the prices of the different color models. As some of them may be marked down while others aren't.

The ASUS has an impressive 13 hours of battery use, compared to the Acer's 4 hours. The ASUS achieves this through it's low energy consuming LED screen and CPU, as well as a more powerful battery.

The Atom N475 is a newer Intel chip than the N450. It is smaller and uses less power. On the speed side it is just a little faster than the N450. Based on reviews of the chip it's around 15% faster, depending on what you are using it for. The new chip, is probably the reason you can get the Acer, with the older chip, at such a discounted price.

These netbooks both come with a number of applications preloaded. The first thing you should do when you get one is to uninstall any of those application that you don't intend to use. Leaving them installed is just a waste of your limited system resources.

Many owners of these Netbooks recommend you upgrade them from 1 GB Ram to 2 GB. It's expensive, but there is definitely a noticeable speed improvement when you do this.

It use to be the case that these netbooks where only used for web browsing. While this is still a valuable function, these days they are used for everything from working with Microsoft Office to watching movies.

When you consider the portability and everything you are able to do with these mini laptops, at such a low cost, they really are great little gadgets.

If you found top 10 netbooks 2016 to be instructive you should also read best external hard drive 2016 and color laser printer review 2016.