TheVille

I am looking for a portable computer to use while on the road. I tend to travel a lot and I do have work to do that requires a computer. Battery life is probably my biggest concern as I can be traveling in a car for 10+ hours and want to maximize my time. I was just wondering what The Ville's opinion was on netbooks. I would like to be able to watch movies and do very modest gaming too while I am not working.

TL;DR
I want to find a portable computer that has decent battery life and can do modest gaming/movies. Is this too much for a netbook to handle?

Specifically what games do you have in mind?

True netbooks will struggle with most games, and both games and movies will eat your battery for dinner if you're using it unplugged. My netbook, which is a mid-tier one, is not something I would ever use for a game where reflexes matter. Things like Plants vs Zombies are a good fit, while Minecraft stretches it to its limits, and sometimes is a bit much.

There is at least one powerful netbook on the larger size (11.6 inch) with an i7 processor, and several more with i5's, though the prices for those units are as much as a similar but larger laptops would be, and I would worry about heat issues. Also, the more powerful the machine, the less battery life it's going to have. The real long-lived battery-sippers are not going to be able to handle much in the way of gaming - they just don't have the hardware installed to do it.

Regardless of selection, I would suggest either a small set of external speakers, or a set of very comfortable headphones, for movie watching. Netbook speakers tend towards the quiet and tinny, even on max volume.

Games like Minecraft and possibly TF2 on very low setting. The problem is there isn't much middle ground between battery life and performance :/

Which model do you have Alizee?

I have a Toshiba Satellite T215D-S1150. I bought it this time last year, so I'd have something I could run powerpoint on in classes and such. It looks like Toshiba has moved out of the 11.6" range (which kinda straddles the border between laptop and netbook), but something roughly equivalent to what I have would be this Lenovo model.

I edited my post above to include this while you were posting, so I'll repost it here: The more powerful the machine, the less battery life it's going to have. The real long-lived battery-sippers are not going to be able to handle much in the way of gaming - they just don't have the hardware installed to do it.

I would be surprised to see TF2 run at all on 95% of netbooks. Low power processors and lack of a GPU of any kind really makes nearly the entire class incapable of the kind of work needed, even for TF2 on minimal settings. My old gaming box ran TF2 at fairly low settings and scraped out 30 fps in combat situations, and that box is still 4 or 5 times more powerful than my netbook.

The most powerful netbook I know of at the moment is the Acer TimelineX AS1830T-68U118 which is the i7 I mentioned previously. While I can vouch for the ability of that CPU (I have its predecessor in my gaming laptop), this TimelineX still has "Intel HD Graphics" as its only graphical option, which in this case is roughly the equivalent of an FX5800 Ultra, a technology that was quickly outmoded upon release in 2003.

10 hours of life unplugged?

Not sure if netbooks last that long.

I think Alize linked to an x120e variant on newegg, here is the full lineup at Lenovo's site:

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thi ... ries/x120e

The x120e series is built around the AMD bobcat APU sporting a HD6310, which has 80 Directx 11 stream pipelines (roughly equivalent to 16 nvidia pipelines) operating at 500MHz and should be able to play tf2 on low (at least the e350 dual core, not sure of the e240 single core). Of course gaming w/o plugging in will reduce your battery much faster than just browsing the web or writing a paper.

Eggers wrote:I am looking for a portable computer to use while on the road. I tend to travel a lot and I do have work to do that requires a computer. Battery life is probably my biggest concern as I can be traveling in a car for 10+ hours and want to maximize my time.

I'm not sure I follow. So you're planning to use it a bit while in the car during commute why you need the long battery life?

If that's the case, I'd just get a decent 12-14" laptop, and a power inverter for use while in the car.

This is probably the best compromise I can find in a 13" size (ignoring my inverter suggestion above), given its use of Optimus, and the 8-cell battery. GT415M is on the low to low-mid range of dedicated graphics, but should be good enough for TF2/MC.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/7 ... puter.html

I have an ASUS EEE 9" from a few years back. It was midpriced back then. I was modestly surprised that I could run Photoshop 7 and Lightroom on it, but it really lags on large files (only a 5400 RPM HD), and it maxed out on 2 GB of RAM. Probably these days you can get something with an SSD for a modest price. For the usual netbook things like e-mail or the web, it's fine, and I can play games with very modest graphics requirements on this. Like... Marathon. I tried TF2 with it in 2009 and it was hilariously awful.

My biggest issue is actually the smallest issue... to keep this thing at a manageable size, I chose a 9" monitor, which was limited to only 1024x600 without having to scroll the screen. Again, you can buy larger, but in that case, why not go back to a regular notebook?

TBH, if you want to a bit of gaming, look for a 13" laptop. They are still small and portable and won't weigh a lot, but they will usually have much of the same types of parts as the larger laptops. Otherwise, a netbook is a netbook is a netbook and doesn't game well.

I'll definitely think about that 13" Laptop Gator. Thanks for the feedback everyone. I think I'll probaly go with a 13" laptop or similar because the big limitations on netbooks. Thanks everyone!

Yeah, netbooks are not meant for games and movies, and not famous for their battery life either. They're good for browsing the web, word processing, and other low-impact processes like Powerpoint. If you want games and movies, get a full laptop.

TheCarpe wrote:Yeah, netbooks are not meant for games and movies, and not famous for their battery life either. They're good for browsing the web, word processing, and other low-impact processes like Powerpoint. If you want games and movies, get a full laptop.

Done and done, no longer looking at netbooks

I really hate to say it, but if you want something portable with good battery life that still has some horsepower behind it... The Macbook Pro series is actually pretty good. Just don't pay for HDD/RAM upgrades, they overcharge so much for those (and they're easy to do yourself).