Would one have enough room for a lot of writing? what do you think? do you know of any good low priced laptops? how much memory is 1 gb compared to other pcs? do you know how much the internet for it would cost? this is the one i am thinking of getting. Netbooks are lightweight, ultra portable internet devices designed specifically for using the web. Netbooks will allow you to surf the web, email, view and share photos, chat face to face using the built in webcam, listen to music, and network on sites such as facebook and myspace. Netbooks do not come with cd or dvd drives, but portable ones can be purchased separately so you can download and run software.

3 cell battery, 2.5 hours run time 8.9 diagonal wsvga 8 brightview widescreen display as a professional writer i am on a perpetual hunt for two things. The constant pursuit of writing excellence can be enhanced with certain tools for writers. Some of these writing tools are technologies or gadgets that can help do some aspect of the writing business better, faster, easier, or cheaper.

How to Write a Critical Analysis Essay of a Film

The chicago manual of style, a good dictionary, a good thesaurus, and a good old notebook and pen. When it comes to technology based writing tools, finding great tools for writers can be hit or miss. The grammar checker in microsoft word can be customized to be a powerful writing tool, but by default is very annoying, for example. Many things that sound like they would be enormously helpful end up being only moderately helpful, or not helpful at all.

Other things that sound like they would be wasteful gadgets end up being a writers best friend. If you looked at netbooks when they first came out like i did, you probably came to the conclusion that they were not usable for serious writers. Things like improperly placed shift keys and tiny non tactile keys made them impossible to touch type on, which makes it worthless for most pro writers. On one forum, a poster actually commented that they didnt use the right shift key all that much anyway! what, you dont capitalize any words that start with s, t, a ? however, technology moves fast, especially in competitive arenas like computer hardware and laptops.

Newer netbooks come with keyboards that have most of the keys in the right places. When a solid acer netbook hit the one deal a day website woot.com, i jumped on it. What finally tipped the balance in favor of buying a netbook? basically, while at a starbucks with my car parked 5 blocks away, my laptop locked securely in the trunk because this was a food, drink, and shopping excursion downtown, an idea that i had been fumbling around with the wording on gelled in my mind as i was waiting for my latte.

Fortunately, i have a notebook and a pen for just this sort of occurrence, but this particular instance called for pulling up some previous research, doing a little bit of current events research and incorporating it all. On my laptop, this is not a problem as i just keep opening windows and programs as the ideas flow, giving each one its start and then returning to the original document, or moving on to the next thought. Unfortunately, with a notebook, all you can do is jot down each of these items, and as you do, you lose momentum, and that train of thought becomes a train wreck of notes that you will be lucky to decipher with any meaning later. I tried to use my mobile phones internet connection, which is fine under normal usage, but it withers under pressure.

I cant open more than one window even with a tabbed mobile browser like opera, more than 2 or 3 is suicide and i cant type fast enough. I ruefully wished that i could have something like my phone that i could carry around everywhere but that would have enough power to run a real web browser and that would have a keyboard i could touch type on. Nothing smaller is really possible because then you would lose the touch type possibility. The screens are small, but perfectly fine for typing and basic research, and the wi fi offers close enough to anywhere connectivity. Many netbooks report their keyboard size based on how much it is compared to a full size keyboard, as in 94% of full sized keyboard. First, i have yet to be able to find exactly what constitutes a full sized keyboard, so for all we know that is 94% of something that none of us use.

My logitech mx3200 wireless keyboard is 11 1/4 inches across from the left most edge of the caps lock key to the right most edge of the enter key. That means that 90% of my keyboard would be 10 1/8 or one and an eighth inches smaller. That doesnt sound like much except that each of the letter keys is 5/8 wide, meaning that in a keyboard that is just 10% smaller than full sized, is the equivalent of 2 whole letters narrower. In other words, one percent matters a lot when you are talking about keyboard size. However, based on standing there typing on the demo netbooks, it seemed like i could make it work, although, the only way to know for sure is to use one in the real world the way a freelance writer uses a laptop or other computer. Luckily, with the woot deal, i got an acer aspire d250 netbook with the 160 gb hard drive and the 1 gb of ram this one can be upgraded to 2 gb supposedly and most importantly, with the bigger battery whats the point of getting a sub 3 lb.

Of weight and a bunch more bulk to carry around a charger for just over $200 including shipping. It is refurbished and a far cry from the best of the best netbooks out there from what i understand, but in the handful of days i have owned it, it has proved that the netbook can be a valuable edition to an authors collection of writers tools. Ill update in the coming days and weeks as i get a better feel for what it can and cannot do. You should have no problems upgrading to any version that it can handle, the reason they use starter is because a: its cheaper so the laptop/netbooks are cheaper by that extra $50, and b: the lower versions don't have flashy extra features that would use extra computing power, thus slightly increasing battery life and ever so slightly lower heat for the same reason. You'll use your laptop to create and then store your precious writing files, so how those files are stored matters. Laptop manufacturers give you an choice between a traditional hard drive disk and the newer solid state disk, which works like a flash drive on steroids. The advantage of solid state drives over hard drives is that they tend to be much faster and are less susceptible to breakage.

However, hard drives cost about 8 cents per gigabyte of storage, while solid state drives cost about 60 cents per gigabyte, according to pc mag. When you're writing your opus on the top of a mountain at sunset, you don't want to concern yourself with how long your battery is going to last you need a laptop that holds a good charge. According to laptop mag, the top three laptops for battery life at the time of publication are the lenovo thinkpad x240 at 20 hours 28 minutes, the lenovo thinkpad t440s at 14 hours 36 minutes and the apple macbook air 13 inch at 12 hours 20 minutes. It might not seem important at the outset, but if you spend much time writing on a keyboard that's difficult to type on or one that has an inadequate palm rest, you'll see why they're important features. The best laptops have at least a few inches of space between the bottom of the keyboard and the edge of the computer, which makes them relatively comfortable for typing.

Some writers gain additional comfort by adding a piece of custom padding to the palm rest area, but that's an aftermarket item. When it comes to other features, balance your desire for portability with the need for a screen you can see. You're not creating animations or editing video, but you spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen a larger screen will spare you from eyestrain.

On the other hand, there's a big difference between carrying around a machine that weighs 7 pounds and one that weighs 2 pounds. The best laptops for writers balance weight and portability with a screen that doesn't create eyestrain. In terms of screen size, think between 11.5 inches on the slim ultraportable end and at least 13 inches on larger laptops. Consider whether you're most comfortable working with microsoft windows, mac os or another type of operating system. If you plan to install other programs beyond your word processing software, you'll probably need windows or mac os rather than an android or another mobile centric operating system. Speaking of mobiles, a tablet computer with or without a wireless enabled remote keyboard is an alternative to using a laptop. Although this can work fine for word processing, experts agree that the slower processing time with tablets makes them inferior for getting real work done.