When the Atom processor, just doesn’t cut it.

I currently have a Dell Mini 9 netbook which has an Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6Ghz on a 533Mhz FSB.  Since the “netbook” is supposed to be a mini laptop, you’d expect the processor to handle what you’re trying to do, right?  Not exactly.  We live in an age of Flash video, 720p/1080p everything, really complex websites and everything being in the “cloud”.  Since netbooks are meant to be internet only laptops, they incredibly fail at this point and I’ll tell you why.
I don’t know who came up with “netbooks”, or who came up with the initial specs of them, but let me tell you, they suck ass.  I know they’re meant to be inexpensive counterparts to regular (read: expensive) laptops, but when the hardware on these guys fails to do what they’re supposed to do, you’d think these comapnies would take a step back and try to fix it.  There’s a few inherent flaws in the design of netbooks, the first being the screen size/resolution.  My Mini 9 has a 9″ screen (thus the 9…clever I know) but a resolution of only 1024×600.  That’s not even the resolution of the iPad or anything else for that matter.  1024×600 is such a low resolution, you can’t do very much, and you’re stuck with incessant scrolling on web pages.  Second, is the video card/chipset.  The Mini 9 (and countless other netbooks) utilize the Intel 950 chipset, which gives you the GMA950 graphics chip and the 945E (for Express!) chipset.  What’s horrible about the GMA950 is that this is the basic of basic for graphics chips, and barely has enough power to give you Aero Glass.  Since the GMA doesn’t offer any sort of acceleration, don’t even think about using Flash 10.1.  The 945E chipset unfortunately only support 2GB of RAM and will refuse to POST with anything larger.  Why would you need more than 2GB of RAM?  Because you can never have enough RAM.  Now I understand that there are some netbooks out there that have the ION chipset from nVidia or even the ION2, but it’s still paired with the Atom processor (which I’ll get to in just a quick minute).  Third, since the netbook is small, so is the keyboard and space to rest your hands while typing.  The keys are so tiny on these these, I feel like I could type faster using my cell phone.  I also don’t have all the keys that I’d normally have on a keyboard, even with the Fn key.  And finally, the Intel Atom processor!  Most netbooks use the Intel Atom N270 CPU, which is only a single core processor with “HyperThreading” (read: a crap attempt to make you think you have a dual core CPU).  Some netbooks out there, do have dual core Atoms, but these are significantly more expensive.  Since the processor only runs at 1.6Ghz, it’s definitely not the fastest thing out there, hell the Nexus One is close to that speed alone!

Let’s give you some examples as to how the Atom processor simply fails (and netbooks in general).  As I mentioned earlier, people love watching YouTube/Hulu/Vimeo/etc…which uses Flash.  As most of you know, Flash is an incredible resource hog and since it’s a bloated piece of software, it runs everything in software mode (read: uses CPU).  Just running a basic 360p video from YouTube causes the CPU to jump to 50-60% if not more.  Why?  Why should I have such a high CPU usage just for watching a simple 360p video?  That’s not even counting the CPU usage from the OS itself, any programs you have open, etc…So just watching that video, could tax your CPU to 100%.  Great, stuttery video.  Don’t even think about watching a 720p video on YouTube, it just won’t play properly.  This is just video alone!  Imagine trying to play Farmville, or CafeWorld on Facebook, you’re going to get 100% CPU no doubt.  So while you were able to play these games on your desktop or even your latop, you’re shit out of luck on a netbook, mostly because of the shit CPU inside.  There are HD accelerators available for netbooks, one being the Broadcom Crystal HD miniPCI-e card.  However, inside the Mini9, there’s only one miniPCI-e slot, so you have to lose WiFi (ugh…).  This card only allows acceleration of Flash for video (not the card’s fault, pure on Adobe), so if you wanted to play those Flash games, good luck, this card won’t help.  This card WILL help if you wanted to watch 720p HD mkv videos, but beware of Windows sucking up CPU usage randomly, causing your HD video to stutter like crazy.  So there’s another thing that your netbook can’t do.

So is there really anything a netbook is good for?  Not really.  Unless you only view google.com or sites that aren’t graphically intensive, or doesn’t use any Flash, you’re going to have a horrible experience.  I love how small the netbook is, I love how convenient it is, but each time I use it, it makes me cry as to how lacking it is.  Why do I have a netbook instead of a desktop/laptop?  I had to consolidate (read: needed money) things and sold my laptop, so I’m stuck with the netbook for now.  I need power, and this thing just doesn’t cut it at all.