Going on holiday and I decided to make a change of just bringing my media player device for waiting in the terminals and decided to buy a secondhand netbook on ebay. I'm trying to decide between SSD or SATA based HDD netbook.

On the one hand, SSD is meant to speed up the booting up process but the storage space is very limited to the point that my 16gb usb pen would have more space. SATA obviously can carry a lot more but the downside is probably slower booting up. How would battery life be affected with SSD and SATA hard drives?

 

i would go for a HDD i have a acer aspire one 120 GB HDD and its great booting times are about 4 secs slower with SDD so not much considering the lower price for a HDD model i got mine from comet for 180 and use it as my main computer it can run windows xp, vista and 7 but i prefer UNR (ubuntu netbook remix) it uses the most out of the screen size making browsing much better.
if you need any more info on netbooks just p.m me ;P

-josh

 

For the record SSD is a type of drive, sata is a drive interface (like IDE/pata, scsi, hippi). It is entirely possible to have a SSD drive on a sata interface (I would imagine it is more or less standard).

Also for the record CF cards are IDE in a different format and they tend to clock a fairly high size so something like http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_mem...er/adsahdcf.asp may be of interest.

As for bootup most operating systems will support a form of hibernation (write ram status to the hard drive) or low power "sleep mode". By the time the BIOS has loaded you are probably looking at the difference of 5 seconds (solid state) and 7 seconds (electromechanical).

One other thing; most of the time if anyone pawns a laptop/notebook/whatever of the grade I sense you are looking at (around £300; enough for music, xvid video and general internet/office work) it is because the life of the battery is all but gone (and probably was not there to begin with). New batteries tend to clock a fair bit and while you can "renew" them I would advise against it unless you know what you are doing.

 

That was another thing I was concerned about. Battery life for some of the netbooks I saw only top out at 3 hours on most of the specs. Investing in a 6-cell one should work out better but that all depends if the price of a preowned netbook AND a new battery doesn't exceed the cost of just buying a brand new one new.

SSD is starting to tip the balance into it's favor because at the end of the day, I'm trying to making this a laptop JUST for browsing and not something permanent.

I take it that if I have an external cd-drive, I can set the bios on any netbook to make it read from that and thus make it install XP?