Why I Chose the Samsung N145 Plus Netbook.

When televisions were first developed many homes were happy to just have one television to watch. As new technology made TVs less expensive, it became commonplace to see more than one television in each home. The same has started happening with computers.

It is possible to have more than one computer for a family to use without having to break the bank in the process. When my wife and I decided to replace our aging desktop computer, we made the decision to purchase two smaller computers.

As a writer by profession I choose a traditional laptop for greater power, word processing ability and web browsing speed. I decided upon a smaller, more portable Samsung N145 Plus Netbook for my wife however and we haven't regretted the choice. We went with a netbook instead of a full size laptop for the following reasons:

Simple needs: web browsing and email

Portability a must: With my spouse in the military, a small portable netbook was easy to take on deployments.

The Samsung N145 netbook provided everything we needed in an additional computer at half the cost of a traditional full size laptop. The N145 was just $199.99 at the local Best Buy and came with a free subscription to Norton Antivirus. While some netbooks are underpowered and provide little to their users, this Samsung netbook was a fabulous choice for our family. The main features of the Samsung netbook include:

10 inch slim screen

Full size keyboard

1GB DDR2 memory

160GB hard drive

1.5 megapixel built-in webcam

Windows 7 starter operating system

A netbook isn't the perfect choice for every individual or family in every scenario. There are a number of things that laptops can do better such as gaming, intense web browsing, and DVD playback. However, many people are paying an extra $200 or $300 for extra hardware they never take full advantage of. A netbook is perfect as a second computer in particular because many models have all the basic hardware necessary to perform simple tasks.

Our Samsung N145 netbook allows my wife to surf the web, use programs such as Skype to keep in touch during deployments, and provides connectivity to other devices through a VGA port and 3 USB outputs. As useful as this netbook has been for our family, it is not without drawbacks. The lack of a disc drive means my wife cannot watch DVDs on her netbook or load new programs. The 1GB DDR2 memory is also a drawback to this particular model. Web browsing was limited to one page at a time and the speed of web browsing was slower than a typical laptop.

Limitations aside, the Samsung N145 Plus netbook was a fantastic purchase as a second computer for our family. Some of the drawbacks can be overcome as well. A simple $30 investment in a 2GB DDR2 memory card improved the performance of the netbook. The affordability and performance of this netbook make it a wonderful investment.