Any students out there? Netbook question

[unbiased]

Guys my nephew is pestering me to buy a laptop with enough battery power to last a full day (say more than 5-6 hrs). I searched and found that under normal category of laptops there are not many such , and if there are , those are way too expensive. I found that the netbooks fall nicely into this category, but my nephew insists that the netbooks are too slow for his work (running mostly spread sheets, and one or two programs like C++ and Visual Studio), and are worse at multitasking.
I know that this boy is a manipulating type, so want to know if he is really speaking straight.
Is the netbook really so inadequate in running such applications? If it is so I may have to shell out more than I would like to. After all a promise is a promise.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Personally, I wouldn't get a netbook to do that sort of work, but we have some Dell E6410's here, and we can get 5-7 hours on a full charge with the extended batteries. They use the i3/i5 if I recall.

 

[Paperlantern]

Well, yes, he is right, they aren't quit as good at multitasking because of the lower powered processor. However that is the trade off for long battery life (unless of course money is no object to you). One of the higher end netbooks with the larger batteries should be adequate albeit not as fast as a full fledged notebook. But thats just my opinion on the matter. You never know how something will perform until you sit down and use it for that task.

 

[Hacp]

Get him an Acer Timeline.

 

[Spicedaddy]

Get a CULV laptop: Acer 1410/1810, Asus UL30, etc.

 

[PCTC2]

Get a CULV laptop: Acer 1410/1810, Asus UL30, etc.

Yeah. Maybe something like a ASUS UL80Vt might fit your bill. It's a 14.1" Notebook that will last up to 530 minutes (over 8 hours) for basic surfing. There's a review of it on Anandtech main site:
Review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2863/6
Compare to UL50Vt: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2886/7

 

[mrcupholder]

Also, what's wrong with having a second battery?

 

[beginner99]

Also, what's wrong with having a second battery?

$$$


He is partially right. But for using visual studio and similar stuff my main concern would be the screen size (resolution) and the size of the keyboard. Else no problem. I actuall yhave netbeans installed on my T91. (= slowest atom). not really a big issue expect not enough screenspace.
Atom is IMHO fine for anything except watching HD-video, video encoding, photo-editing, any other cpu heavy tasks.

 

[unbiased]

Thank you all, for the valuable help!!

 

[Lonyo]

I have an 11.6/1366x768 netbook, and the resolution is nice enough.
I only typically do light work (Word + pdfs + using Firefox).
I could envisage that trying to do something more demanding would get tiresome. It depends on how demanding the programs and types of things he would be doing are. Simply having a spreadsheet open is one thing, but running calculations on it is another, same with writing code vs compiling something.

A more powerful processor is always nice and something with a CULV processor would be better than a netbook. like Spicedaddy said.

 

[jaydee]

Asus UL20?

 

[Zolty]

Just going to throw this out there but as a student half of my classes have power outlets within 5 feet of the desks. I get 3-4 hours on my 900a eee pc / charge and I have never had problems with it running out mid class.

 

[slugg]

A netbook screen is just NOT enough for working in Visual Studio, in my opinion. On top of the horrible performance, of course.

I'd go for an ultraportable, non-netbook. Look into the Lenovo Thinkpad X series. Fantastic laptops. 9 hour batteries, fully powered, full sized keyboard, enough screen space to do real work, and top of the line build quality.