Those who start looking around for a netbook to get are put in a situation where they need to take a look at the components of each and every machine to make a good decision. Which one is fast enough, which gives a good battery life and if there are viable alternatives. The most popular processor is still the N270 Atom in cheaper category mini notebooks, you should be aware of the performance it provides.
Performance is usually described when this processor is involved as “good enough”, or “good enough for Internet browsing”. What does that even mean may the average user ask, does it work well with Skype, can you watch movies? What about some games, can you play them? What do they mean with Internet browsing anyway, does that mean it runs flash too?
The N270 is made to be the core of portable computers. Before Intel had this core they had to use down-clocked, filtered Celerons and mobile Pentiums to even start to tackle the netbook category, now they have a fully equipped heavy bomber. Or do they? The n270 is designed in a way that is not used in desktop processors. Intel basically threw everything away that would have made the processor 1% faster at the cost of more than 1% power consumption.
This is why some parts of the processor that could have benefited scientific calculations or games were omitted. HyperThreading however made it into the final product, that’s why you see two processors in Task Manager while the computer has only one processing core. This single core is good for a lot of things; most often mentioned is browsing. It can run a browser without a hitch, you will be able to use multiple tabs and thanks to the 1GB RAM often used with the processor and Hyper Threading.
You can watch movies, you just need to take a look at several points of the said video. Is it streaming media, YouTube for example? In this case you’ll have to set it to 360p to enjoy fluid motion, otherwise it would just be a painful stuttering set of images put together. If you choose your codec pack or media player well, and the movie is encoded just right, you can attempt 720p, but don’t expect everything to work right away, also note that no netbook comes with integrated optical drive, which may make it difficult to obtain the latest titles.
Flash games work perfectly, in case it is a more crafty product, FarmVille pops to mind, you may want to set quality settings to low. N270 is good enough to enable video chat, and integrated webcameras make it even easier. You can do almost anything with a mini notebook, but keep in mind that these are cheap, low power consumption devices, so the right set of expectations is advised.
