Netbook Review – Acer, Asus Netbook Review

1. Google Picasa

Most netbooks start with off with a limited amount of space. If you happen to take a lot of  photos      with your digital camera, you will run start hogging your netbook’s memory. If you  own an SLR or  equivalent, a single upload from your memory card may take upwards of 5%  off your 160GB HDD.  Not only does Google’s Picasa find and organize all the photos on your  computer almost  instantaneously, it can also be used to store and publish photo albums  online. Picasa notifies you  when friends upload new pictures, allows you to edit your own  pictures and does all this for free.  It’s a great little software.

2. Launchy

This one is a personal favourite of mine. One of the most annoying things about a Windows based platform (and you only actually find out how annoying it is if you’ve ever used a Mac) is finding programs or files in “My Computer” or off the Start menu. Launchy replicates Mac’s Finder, which is a neat little box where you type in the file you’re looking for. Launchy will then give you a number of options to choose from. Double click. Open. Launchy also lets you search the web.

3. Paint.net

Adobe Photoshop is just not going to cut it on a netbook. Paint.net, a free photo editing software was originally designed to replace MS Paint but it evolved into a viable alternate to Photoshop. For users already seeped in the Adobe tool, the interface is a cinch. Paint.net has layer support, infinite undo,   special effects and a host of feature-rich editing tools. It is an open community based software and     there’s loads of people constantly updating it, posting tutorials and just generally helping each out. This is a great free software.

4. Gmail Offline

Gmail has pretty much replaced hotmail as the online email domain of choice. Now, with Gmail offline, users are able to access mails and type out replies while offline. There’s going to be an exodus from such programs as Outlook, if this catches on. The software caches messages on the hard drive using Google Gears. As soon as you connect to the internet, all the messages that you typed automatically get sent. While you aren’t able to access other gmail features like calendar and documents, it’s rumoured that Google is working on incuding this in the package as well.

5. Windows Movie Maker

We know, we know. This is so old. Nonetheless we have to give kudos to Microsoft for coming up with a program that achieves all the basic functions of video editing without annoying freezes and without grabbing resources inordinately. While you’re not going to be doing any green screen compositing or adding any crazy special effects with this program, you can splice together videos from a camcorder, add an audio track and just generally mess around with its simple interface.

Filed under: Netbook