Computers in Business :: Ireland's Leading Business IT Magazine

By Adrian Weckler

Netbooks are slow, clumsy and usually underpowered, yet that has done nothing to quell their popularity among Irish laptop buyers. According to IT retailers, netbooks outsold full-size laptops during the busy Christmas period.

One of the higher-specification models available is Toshiba’s NB200. It has a relatively large 250GB hard drive and about the most powerful netbook processor available on the Irish market. It is also a clean, modern design, with very little of the plastic feel that some of its rivals have. Here, we look at how it performs in its most important tasks.

The NB200’s battery life is one of its highlights. Toshiba claims that it has a battery life of nine hours from its six-cell battery. It doesn’t. But I usually got more than six hours from it which, all things considered, is a very decent performance.

Netbooks are the Ladas of laptops and the NB200 is no exception. Using Windows 7 Starter edition, it takes about 60 seconds to switch on fully and about the same to power down. It is a little slower at opening, modifying and saving applications, programs and files than bigger, full-size laptops.

Under the hood, it has an Intel Atom N280 processor, which delivers a (single-core) performance of 1.66Ghz. In other words, it’s considerably weaker than even a modestly powered dual-core laptop (as all netbooks are). It also comes with 1 gigabyte (GB) of Ram, although this is expandable to 2GB, which I would recommend.

The version I have has a 250GB hard drive, which is much bigger than most netbooks. There is also a version with 160GB.

The NB200’s 10.1-inch screen is among the better examples available on the netbook market. Although it is glossy, it supports quite a high resolution (1024×600) and is both sharp and vivid. Fingerprints are also easy to wipe off.

The machine’s keyboard is close to full size, despite being on a small device. Design-wise, it follows the fashionable trend of silver, flat, thin, individually spaced keys (typically used by Apple and Sony). This makes it look very modern. It also performs well.

The touchpad is as large as is possible on a netbook. It also supports a version of finger swipe navigation, which is useful, if not entirely consistent.

TheNB200 is one of the better looking netbooks on the market. It comes in a choice of mutedcolour cases (mine is an attractive metallic brown). It is quite light, at 1.33kg, and thin, at 2.5 centimetres.

The NB200 has three USB slots, a VGA-out port and an ethernet slot. It also has a memory-card slot (SD-only) and a microphone-in port. Bluetooth, an important feature for transferring cameraphone images, is built in.

However, you will need to hunt for it to switch it on.

The review machine stalled once or twice. It also has a curious occasional habit of skittering between windows, which can only by remedied by putting the machine into sleep mode. Also, the netbook suffers the same problem that all new laptops and PCs face, which is the stifling weight of marketing software that comes pre-loaded on it. It is a good idea to download a program called ‘PC Decrapifier’ which eliminates annoying ‘updates’.

Overall, the NB200 is about as good a netbook as you can get. Despite a few small problems, it performs very well for what it is intended for: use on planes, trains and other tight places.