Can netbooks handle large pdf, doc and xls files?

Peter Principle

Specifically wondering about this model:

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11630190&whse=BC&Ne=4000000&eCat=BC|84|78454&N=4047244&Mo=2&pos=3&No=1&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&cat=78454&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&lang=en-US&Sp=C&ec=BC-EC5-Cat84&topnav=

But I'm also curious in general about the computing power of these types of computers. Can they open a 300+ page, 50-100 mb document in PDF format (in a reasonable time frame), and can they run MS Office?

Spectral Swallow

I use a 3 year old net book with similiar specs and have never had any problems opening huge PDFs (scanned in strategy guides, etc).
I WOULD recommend switching from adobe pdf reader to foxit. I was blown away by how much quicker pdfs opened and displayed when changing pages.

DusT_HounD

Seconded- i'm an academic (postdoc), and for about three years, have used a netbook exclusively (Asus eee901) when not in my office, for work- related tasks- MS Office, Inkscape portable etc. without any problems. Also, i'm seconding Foxit- a brilliant PDF reader with much smaller footprint than adobe's bloatware.

I've upgraded my RAM to 2GB, though, so that might also be providing something of a performance boost for handling larger files.

MagicToaster

if youre patient enough, you can even run Photoshop 7 on it!

The Crowing One

If you're just worried about text and smaller files of the like, a netbook will handle them with ease. I've been using a netbook a bit here and there lately and my general observation has been that they're pretty compact and efficient, with the negative that they're just not very fast compared to today's CPUs. Going from a quad-core PCU to the tiny little processors in a netbook can be a bit of a shock ("it takes forever to load" is 10 seconds instead of 3).

You won't be able to play games or such, but even the first gen DellMini I've used is able to handle 720 video files without too many glitches.

LaPuzza

I'm using an old EEEPC - 2+ years old, when a cheap ass netbook was still $300. Office is just fine, but it is hell to work with HQ PDF files in Adobe. Thanks to this thread I'm looking for foxit when I get home.

kuhlmeye

I've had my netbook (ASUS 1000) for about 3 years now. Its great. Handles pdfs fine (like the repair manual for my car) and I've done excel work with it before.

My recommendation is get go ahead and upgrade to 2GB of RAM. Seriously, its like, 15 bucks and it makes a huge difference in performance.

Looks like I will also be looking into foxit

Peter Principle

Sweet, thanks for the info everyone. I think one of these is in my future.