OT: Computer Guru's....HELP me!

My sons, 10 & 12, would like laptop mini's for christmas. So I have been looking around.

I see that there are categories for laptops and for netbooks.

What is the difference? If it was the same thing, why are they in different categories on the websites?

Can anyone help? They do not need top of the line. But I don't want complete junk. They mostly email, youngest plays webkins, oldest like getting on sites like discovery channel etc.

There will be limited access to what they can access so I avoid any "accidental" XXX stuff. But essentially it's kids use. Also, no online gaming with that stuff guys do.

Any help?

Not a guru, however, what I can tell you from researching myself, because I want my next computer to be a laptop, is that the netbook is a smaller and more limited type of machine, generally, good for the type of usage you are talking about.  You might try going to CNET.com to see what they consider the best of the netbooks, also can sign up for Consumer Reports, you can do it for as little as a month and check out what their recommendations are for the various computers.  By going to those sites you are getting an unbiased look at which are the best computers/laptops/netbooks on the market right now.  My research when I was looking at the netbooks, was Asus 900H or some such one, but that was last year, not sure as I put it on the shelf, you know, what I want vs. what I need and since my home computer works just fine for now, it's on the list of things I want, but not sure when it will become what I need. . . 

Good luck.

Laureen

i will ask Jeremy when he gets home... he helps pick out things like that for work... IT nerd lol... he also does a ton of price checking etc...

Jojo,

The netbooks are designed for primarily online use with a little word processing types of things thrown in.  They generally don't play DVD movies (but can display downloaded movies), have a CD/DVD drive, or have a big hard drive for file storage.  Their strength is that they are small, cheap, and designed for online work.

Depending on what the boys may need to do for school in the next year or two, they may need supplemental access to a larger machine (to do things like burn a DVD for a project, for example), but for what you've described the netbooks are probably good choices.

However, if you think they're going to want to do more involved things, then I'd think about a regular notebook or tablet PC.  Prices are coming down on them rather quickly. 

I second the suggestion to check out consumer reports for recommendations.  I can tell you that both my daughter and I have HP laptops and love them.  My other daughter has a Toshiba laptop that's a year older and has had one problem with it (which was repaired) but otherwise has liked it.

Karen

I am NO expert but I've had a Toshiba (first laptop) and now an HP.  I like the HP better but I think its because its newer/faster than the Toshiba was yet the Toshiba was the best I could get at the time.  The netbook is smaller and will do much of what you want but you probably want to think about what they'll need 2 years down the road (no longer than that, but 2 years anyway).  If school is going to require any type of word processing or project creation like DVDs like Karen suggests, I would go with the laptop.

We have a desktop that is a family shared computer, so I was thinking just online would be good. But, my 12 year old does make Power Point presentations and so forth, so a regular laptop is probably best.

thanks for the advice.