Small netbook/ notebook suggestions?

[86waterpumper]

Ok here is the deal. At the end of the year, I am going to be passing down my lenovo ideapad s12 to my daughter so she can use it for her schoolwork etc. I have upgraded it to 3gb of ram and I like everything about this computer except the crappy atom cpu. I want to find a replacement for it that has a bit more cpu horsepower. The budget on this is somewhat flexible but I don't want it going anywhere near a grand, so things like macbook airs and vaios are out of the question. I think I paid $399.00 for this one when it was new. I had hoped that there would be some more Llano designs coming out in smaller form factors but haven't seen any yet? So what would be best to go for, something like a E-450 or a i3 or what? I guess everything by now has gone to 16:9 as well that is one thing I liked about the ideapad was it was 16:10. The netbook I have now has hdmi out it would be nice to have that, but anyway if anyone has suggestions I'd appreciate it!

 

[TheStu]

HP just refreshed the dm1z (or something) their little better-than-a-netbook-not-quite-an-'ultrabook' system. It has an 11" 1366*768 screen, an AMD CPU and other stuff. I think that might be what you are looking for.

 

[86waterpumper]

Hmmm my wife has a 17" hp and I haven't been very impressed at all with the overall build quality...I will look into them thanks.

 

[Zap]

There are probably lots of options out there. For instance I'm looking into a Dell Vostro V131 for my wife. They start at $499 for the following configuration:

Sandy Bridge based dual core Celeron (a LOT faster than Atom)
2GB RAM
random 250GB or 320GB HDD
13.3" matte LCD
4 pounds
very thin
full size keyboard
great battery life

$100 more bumps it to a Core i3 2310M or something like that, at 1GHz more clock speed + Hyperthreading and HD 3000 graphics.

 

[86waterpumper]

Yeah there are a few diff. machines available I will probably wait and see if any new ones come out before year's end. The i3 does seem like a good cpu to shoot for, it seems to be a good balance between cpu power and battery life to me. The llanos wouldn't be bad either but it is taking forever to get many products that are smaller to the market with them for whatever reason maybe hard to make them fit in the smaller cases without extra heat? The ultrabooks look nice, but I just can't see paying twice the money my previous netbook cost for LESS vertical resolution.

I wish you could get somewhere between the ultrabooks and the cheaper stuff. I would love to buy something with say a i3 around 2ghz, and maybe 4gb ram, a smallish 40 or 60gb ssd,
and it wouldn't have to have all the flashy aluminum and be half a inch thick or even have a 8 hour battery life. Maybe the pricing could be somewhere inbetween at something like 700 bucks.
When you configure a machine with any ssd though it's like they instantly add 300 bucks or something insane to it, so you end up paying what a ultrabook would cost anyhow for a lesser machine.

 

[Zap]

The llanos wouldn't be bad either but it is taking forever to get many products that are smaller to the market with them for whatever reason maybe hard to make them fit in the smaller cases without extra heat?

I don't know what the reason is, but yes I also have been disappointed with Llano. Not what I've read about their performance, but the actual products that are available to me. I'm not buying a Llano APU to stare at. I'm buying a complete system. Why are they all 15.6" or larger screens? Toshiba makes some really bulky/heavy 14" screen models. Lenovo may be the great white hope with their 14" model that will be reasonably light (4 pounds?) but it isn't available yet. But you can buy ginormous 17" models.

 

[Nintendesert]

Go shopping at Bestbuy.com, as crazy as that sounds they have a ton of computers at the 299 and 349 price point.