LITTLE PACKAGES,
A
few years ago, SUVs were riding high, with throngs of the
massive gas-guzzlers clogging the highways. Compact
cars were considered wimpy and passé. Fast-forward
to the present day and suddenly small is back in style. It’s not
the size that matters, as the saying goes, it’s what you do with
it. Since the advent of Asus’s Eee PC, manufacturers have
been racing to bring tiny, low-powered laptops, also known
as netbooks, to the market. You probably won’t use a netbook
as your primary computer: limited storage space, integrated
graphics, and the lack of an optical drive make them unsuitable
for any really intensive tasks. But as small, eminently portable
word-processing and Internet-browsing devices, netbooks hitthe price/performance sweet spot for many people. By the end
of 2008, more than 8 million netbooks will have been shipped.
In just the past several months, the netbook market has
gone from nonexistent to immense, with dozens of models out
already, most of them built around Intel’s low-voltage Atom
processor, but some on VIA’s C7-M.
For this roundup, we chose three Atom-based netbooks
running XP from three different vendors at three different price
points to determine what this new category of portable PCs
is capable of and how much price fi gures into performance.
Ultimately, we aim to answer whether this new breed of portable
PC is something we should even care about.A burgeoning breed of supersmall, superportable PCs is upon us. We get
hands-on with three of these so-called netbooks to see if they measure up
to the hype BY NATHAN EDWARDS
62 | MAXIMUMPC | DEC 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com