L337 Speak

It’s a new year of college and its round about time when most you make your new hardware buying decisions. Traditionally it’s a toss up between a desktop and a laptop with a laptop increasingly making more sense with Wi-Fi in the campus and hostels. But before you actually make your buying decision I'd like to introduce you to a new and exciting series of laptops called Nettops or Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPC). These are low power consuming, very portable devices with good battery life. And then again it is not exactly the Jesus gadget either-downsides are small screens (typically 7", 8.9" or 10") and average processor and graphics performance. But then look at this way; if all you do with your computer is browse the web, do a bit of office apps, watch movies, listen to music and play minesweeper the rest of the time how much more performance do you really need??

Desktops have clearly outlived their use. Most laptops nowadays can do all that a desktop can do at a very small premium in price unless of course you are a hardcore gamer on a budget in which case a desktop is your only choice. But for the rest of us a nettop makes a lot of sense. The whole craze started off with Asus launching their Eee-PC some time last year. Nettops existed even before in the form of the One laptop per child (OLPC) platform but it was woefully underpowered and targeted at a whole different audience to adequately capture the imagination of the mainstream market. The Eee-pc changed the rules of the game. Now you had an ultraportable that came at a throw-away price of about $400(prices have since reduced to about $300-roughly 13k Indian rupees- on some models) and which did most of the things that most people do on their PCs satisfactorily and also came with the added advantage of being light and portable with very good battery life. It was an instant hit. With that success most other major manufacturers have jumped onto the fray with increasingly better products with better value and features. Most of the initial thunder of the Eee-PCs has since been stolen and now you have everybody from a Lenovo to apna desi HCL and everyone in between peddling nettops.

Of course an exhaustive review of nettops is not possible within the confines of this tech page and with my limited resources but if you are really interested in picking one up I would suggest checking out the MSI Windbook and Dell Inspirion mini-9. The ones on offer by Acer and Lenovo are also great buys. Nettops make for good second computers as well. All of them come with wi-fi inbuilt(duh!!) and some of them like the Eee Pc and the Dell machine have inbuilt HSDPA which means that when 3g does become a reality you can actually put in a 3g compatible SIM inside and have truly mobile internet wherever you go. Here are a few pointers you could keep in mind if you are planning to buy a nettop

1. Most nettops come with an option of an SSD or a harddrive. SSDs generally give anywhere between 4gb and 16gb of storage and hard-drives 80-120gb of storage. But SSDs are more reliable, faster and consume less power. They also boot up faster. I recommend taking the SSD route if it’s going to be your secondary computer or the hard drive version if it’s going to be your primary computer. Alternatively you can also buy the SSD version and plugin a portable hard drive if you need more storage. Most Nettops also come with a free online storage account which is a great idea.

2. Most of these Nettops come with options on batteries. I suggest you go for the most number of cells. It will increase weight a bit but then you don’t have to fight over charging slots in the canteen. A 4-cell battery should give you about 3.5-4 hours of usage under normal conditions.

3. Windows or Linux-The only reason I choose Windows over Linux is because it runs all my games. If you are not going to be playing age of empires or NFS on this (although you can if you want to) then go for the linux version. They are custom built Linux distros with user friendliness kept in mind-much more user friendly than Windows in some cases. The Windows version is more expensive but then these are the only devices for which you can legally still get Win XP preinstalled- so if you are in the mood for some windows love go ahead.

4. Some fully loaded Nettops will cost you close to 21k which is the price of an entry level 15.4 inch laptop. But then you have to understand that both of them are different classes of machines and for different uses. The nettop is lighter, more portable, is designed to run much longer and you look a lot cooler using a slick new nettop than a 15.4” piece of crapware. Everybody has a laptop these days but a Nettop is for the truly connected netizen.

Am I using one??No...But if you ever buy one please let me know so that I can play around it with for a while and then I'll be grateful to you for life and maybe...just maybe even let you touch my iPhone when I get one.

Thy Geekdom come. Amen!!!