I have a Samsung N130 and have to say I am very pleased with it. I very much like the keyboard which is important as I do alot of typing. However it is showing its age with the screen surround being broken and the battery doesn’t hold a charge like it used to. I would also like just a little more umph. I use chrome, word 97 and a PDF reader and I wondered if anyone could offer any suggestions for a suitable replacement.
You are going to get loads of replies so let me kick off 
If you like the machine, buy another one the same but less worn out. I’ve done that a couple of times. There are loads of refurbished laptops on the web and you may be able to find one that has never been opened.
Otherwise… Samsung do loads of these and the company is perhaps middle of the consumer IT quality spectrum. Basically good stuff. At the top end is probably Lenovo; we use Thinkpads at work and they get absolutely hammered and just carry on working. We buy them refurbished and sometimes get unopened ones which are sold “refurb” because they are last year’s models – 1/3 off. I carry an x60s on all travels (12" laptop, would be “dated” today but with a 80GB SSD runs great). Apple stuff is also at the top end but you may need to install windows on it (which you can) to run your software; I know a number of people who did that.
You are probably running winXP and all new stuff is now win7 or even win8. This may or may not bother you; the M$ Orifice stuff and the mainstream stuff runs just the same.
I have two Lenovo x60s laptops identically configured but if I was buying a laptop now I would buy an x230 which is arguably around the top of the 12" sort of size. Not cheap though, and bigger than a 10" one. I had a 10" ASUS for a couple of years, bought specially for travelling, but much prefer a 12" size for a superior keyboard. At the 10" level I would go for a Samsung.
For netbooks battery capacity is very important. Nothing is more annoying than a computer lasting only 2 hours on a charge.
I don’t know about the Lenovo’s but the Apple MacBook Air’s have a pretty impressive battery capacity. The 11 inch version last about 8 to 9 hours and the bigger 13 inch up to 12 hours. I’ve even read reports on the web that some can get 15 hours out of them, but that is with reduced backlight and some other stuff closed.
Software for a Mac is not a problem. Only very specific software is made only for windows. PDF reading comes standard with a Mac and you can download Google Chrome for your browsing needs. Microsoft also makes an office suite that runs natively on a Mac, a free alternative could be OpenOffice or LibreOffice. All can handle doc files from word 97. For better compatibility with large or old doc(x) files I would recommend the Microsoft suite.
It looks like the time for netbooks is over. I have a verry old Asus with “onboard” umts unit. Since two jears I look to replace it, but not found a good performa. Windows 7 kills all the extra speed from the cpu! I get a two month old Levo in my hands, still not faster then my 4 jear old darling :-(
When the jepp updater works on the Macbook, this would be a good option!
It is a general rule that newer software puts more load on the hardware, so that every gain in hardware performance is used to cover that increased complexity and thus brings no improvement to net performance. Recently I booted a stone-age i486 with MS-DOS – it booted far quicker than today’s Windows or Linux.
That said, I am afraid that you are right about the demise the netbook. I regret that quite, as my self-written gps software runs neatly on the (Linux-powered) Asus 900, but today’s tablets outperform netbooks in every way. Only too bad they won’t run Linux – I might well need to re-write my gps in Java. Not a pleasant thought.
I must admit the netbook hardware is not convincing: the display lacks luminosity, and the battery keeps only for an hour or two so that I needed to create a power facility from the plane’s battery. Luckily that required only a low-drop analog voltage regulator and the usual periphery.
I think the “netbook” thingy was largely wrapped up with the Linux craze where the big names thought that normal people are going to be willing to use unix (with a GUI resembling the Digital Research GEM of the 1980s) just to knock about €50 off the retail price of the product (no license fee to Microsoft). That didn’t last long and soon they were being sold with winXP, which worked fine. I had an ASUS 900 for a couple of years but as I said eventually got fed up with the keyboard.
A very good point about battery life. I am sure a big driver behind the Ipad, and many people running their entire “IT life” on an Ipad (plus an Iphone of course ) is its great battery life. Imagine an Ipad with a 1-day battery life – like many smartphones. Given that everybody with an Ipad also has a smartphone, people would not tolerate having to charge both of them every night. They put up with charging the phone because they have no choice.
There are quite a few 12" laptops which now achieve 5+ hrs and that is quite good. The old x60s with the extended battery does about 7hrs.
No way could I do any significant writing on a tablet and I wouldn’t bother even typing up this message on a tablet (not least because I would not accept my own writing with loads of typos) but clearly opinions vary
I own two Thinkpads (used to have four …) and two MacBooks…. but ever since I have an iPad (2010) … i don’t carry laptops around anymore. I am fine with the on screen keyboard (although I make more typos) but there are fine keyboard covers for the ipad that convert it almost into a laptop.
Cheers for your replies and I think peter probably right in that I should go for more of the same. So after having a look round apparently there is a NP-NC10 which is very similer to what I have already however it can come with a Dual Core 1.6 Atom processor which should give a touch more umph than what I have got at the moment. Sadly I can’t seem to find any retailers that are selling them. I get the impression that the bottom has dropped out of the net book market. Anyway there is a couple for sale on ebay so I get bidding.
Many thanks
The Sony Vaio has been running for three years now with no issues – good battery life and compact
