Samsung NC10

I managed to pick up this netbook for £299 which is oustanding value - from play.com.

The netbook is very light and can fit almost anywhere - it is very easy to carry around - you can set up anywhere and very easily connect to the internet where available.

The netbook looks very stylish and everything is laid out well. The keyboard is the biggest i have ever seen on a netbook - its almost full size which is a bonus as I have a lot of typing to do. One disadvantage of this is that the mousepad has been made very small which is a nuisance - you do get used to it but it is not ideal.

The specs for this netbook are impressive I mean a massive 160GB hard drive, a 10.2 inch screen. 1 GB of RAM and a 1.6GHZ intel atom processor. This spec allows the netbook to operate very fastly - the whole 6 months I have had this netbook - it has never froze and I run a lot of demanding programs at once e.g Word and Paintshop.

The 160GB goes a very long way - its common knowlefge that you do not get 160GB as the operating system takes up room and other system priorities. The screen is quite big - it is very bright and generally displays everything really nicely. The only problem with the screen is the resolution - the max is 1024*600 - now this sometimes causes problems especially yahoo mail - I had to revert back to the old style mail as the screen could not display it properly - as detected by yahoo and confirmed by me.

The battey life is the biggest selling point - I mean it is what made me buy the netbook. Now after 6 months of use - I am not impressed with the battery life. I mean if you want the 6 - 8 hours you will need to have everything on the lowest settings and basically not do anything demanding. I have got 8 hours using the batttery manager - i placed everything at the lowest settings and got my 7 and a half hours.

But after a recharge with everything on lowest settings - running some demanding programs - i got 4 and a half hours - now whilst this is still good - its not that impressive. If you switch to max performance the netbook is superb - everything is much faster and more enjoyable but then you will be getting a maximum battery life of 3 hours. Then there is the fact that batteries lose power after a while anyway.

The netbook can also get very hot - whether its charging or not - so dont put it on bare legs :-)

The charger is good and it doesn't take long to charge - especially when you can use the netbook whilst it is charging. The sleeve for storage is losuy and does nothing to protect the netbook - as well as there being no valcro lid to secure the netbook.

The netbook comes with windows XP service pack 3 - it really performs well on this machine - windows XP is very easy to use and compliments the system. Some say these netbooks are only really for the internet - well let me assure you - a lot more can be done on this one.

There is lots of connectivity for this netbook - there are 3 USB ports - a card reader - and an ethernet port - all work well and have very fast transfer rates. I had about 100 songs to write onto a USB stick and it was done in about 5 minutes - that is very quick.

This netbook is outstanding and is the best on the market even if it is slighlty more expensive than some of the others.