Netbook or Notebook? Is there a difference?

These days when people are talking about a computer that you can pick up and take with you anywhere, the terms laptop, netbook, and notebook are used interchangeably. But are these all just different terms for the same thing or are there actual differences between the three? Well, laptops are notebooks but neither of these are netbooks. Netbooks were originally designed to only browse the Internet and so they had very limited memory space and almost nothing for a hard drive. Today, they do have a few more capabilities but the same concept is still in play.

Laptops, or notebooks, are like a mini desktop computer that you can use for browsing the Internet, preparing, saving, editing and reviewing documents, sending email, and hooking anything up to it to turn that slim notebook into a fully functioning PC. Because of their extra abilities and because users generally use these machines a lot and ask a lot out of them, they are generally a bit larger in size to provide the needed room for the hardware, along with giving the user something they can look at for longer periods of time, a larger screen.

Not only are netbooks smaller in size, usually being about 8.9″, they can’t do nearly as much as laptops can. This is also because of their size and because they simply don’t have the space that’s needed to install things such as graphic cards, hard drive space, and other necessities for a high-performance machine. The great thing about netbooks is that they are significantly cheaper than even the most inexpensive laptop models and so, they make terrific machines for those who only need to do one or two things on the netbook but still need to be able to take it with them wherever they are.