What's the Difference Between a Netbook and a Laptop?

Although netbooks have been around for a couple of years, they are quite knew and unknown for most people. That's why many confuse them with laptops or try to find the differences between netbooks and laptops.

That's why in the rows below I'm going to explain to you what is the difference between a netbook and a laptop in a couple of short and easy to understand lines.

First of all, netbooks are like the tiny brothers of regular laptops. that's because they are lighter and smaller. While the average laptop has a 15.4" screen and weights around 4.5-5 pounds, the average netbook these days has a 10" screen and weight around 2.8 pounds. And since it has a smaller screen, it also has a smaller body and it's more compact and easier to carry around.

Then, netbooks come with smaller screens and usually smaller resolution. You might have already got that from the previous paragraph, but since netbooks are smaller, so are their screens. You can get them with displays between 7 to 12 inches, while laptops have displays between 12 to 19 inches, and there are only a handful of 12" versions.

Also, netbooks are more portable than laptops. Besides that size issue, they also come with better battery life. if you could expect and average 3 hours life from a 15.4" notebook, a standard 10" netbooks can easily give you these days 6 to 8 hours, with some even passing the 10 hours mark. and that's something a standard laptop can't offer you.

the bigger autonomy of netbooks is mostly due to the lower hardware they house. Yes, netbooks are meant to use low-consumption hardware that can only offer a limited amount of performances. they're good for basic every-day stuff, but when it comes to resources hungry applications or games, they can't take the challenge. Laptops on the other hand can even house ultra-per formant hardware, as there are bigger desktop-replacement devices with up to 3 hard-drives, Sli graphic cards and high end CPUs.

Last but not at all least, there's the price mater. A standard netbook goes for around $350 and offers a good 10" screen, decent hardware, good built low profile body and an autonomy of around 8 hours. You can get laptops for these money actually, but you'll end up with a big and bulky device with hardware not much better than what you can find in netbooks and very poor autonomy. A good laptop though runs for 600-800 bucks and high end versions could easily jump $2000. So, although there are differences in performances between laptops and netbooks, these differences are seen in their price tags.

So, as a conclusion, a netbook is like a sub-laptop. It has a screen, keyboard, touch-pad and most used ports and can offer enough power to run standard apps. It's also compact light and comes with a very good battery life for a very good price. laptops on the other hand are bigger and with a lower autonomy, but they can provide all the extra Netbook performance is missing.

There are other small details, and you can do more in this article about the difference between netbook and laptop computers.

Thanks To : Toshiba Satellite M505D-S4000 Toshiba Satellite A505D-S6008