Laptop/Netbook Advice

jhunter46

I'll be student teaching next semester and I'm going to need a netbook or a notebook that I can use to prepare and display PowerPoints and show some hidef videos on.

I've been using an Acer Aspire One for the last year or so and I've really enjoyed the great battery life and low weight but it isn't going to meet my needs for next semester.

I've been looking at some of the new netbooks with the Nvidia Ion Chipsets and they seem nice but I haven't really seen anything concrete with regards to performance. I've also been looking at notebooks with a Geforce 9400m. It seems like anything with the 9400m would be paired up with a dual core rather than an Atom processor.

Does anyone have any experience with higher end netbooks or lightweight notebooks featuring the 9400m?

Oh, and I guess I'd like to be able to do some lightweight gaming on it, maybe some Starcraft II when it ships or possibly some C&C Red Alert 3 and the like.

nescientist

I think the ION is a 9400m, just edited for power consumption and such. I also think it's the only graphics processor that gets paired with the atom, so probably the only graphics card any netbook will have. This is handy as a quick and dirty reference if you're comparing a couple machines with cards you don't immediately recognize, though the ION isn't on that list, possibly because as a netbook-specific piece of hardware it's not really apples to apples anyway.

I was at first unsure whether SC2 counts as "lightweight" gaming, though a quick googling suggested that based on its XP compatibility and pixel shader 2.0 requirement the running estimate places the minimum reqs around the FX5500 / radeon 9700 area which is very very forgiving and would definitely place it in the ION-runnable category, especially considering that those netbooks only have to render in 1366x768 resolution anyway.

EDIT: Also, I noticed you're citing hi-def video as one of the reasons you want a graphics card. Keep in mind that Flash-served video, which is fucking everything these days, still does not take advantage of graphics cards. Though an update to add in support for hardware acceleration is anticipated, as they're shipped right now I don't think ION netbooks can handle youtube 1080p, because adobe's shitty fucking software will ignore that wondrous new video card in favor of the extremely low power (sadly not only in watts) atom processor.