Two years ago I bought a netbook. I bought it because it was small, cheap, lightweight, and had good battery life. Two years later I have some thoughts.

I bought the Asus 1000 HA with Windows XP and 1 GB of RAM from Amazon (yay Prime free 2 day shipping and no tax). I also bought a nice messenger bag to carry it in. And I bring it with me just about everywhere I go.

Windows XP performs well. I tried Windows 7 briefly back in beta. And I have Ubuntu on my second partition. I pretty much just stay in Windows most of the time.

My netbook is perfect for lite browsing of the web and watching standard definition video and looking at digital photos from my camera’s SD card. Actually, that’s all it’s good for.

My netbook is NOT good for many things, and these are very important things to me. Things like playing video games, watching hi-def videos, and multitasking. My netbook struggles with 10 year old video games like Diablo 2, pretty much making any decent video gaming impossible. Hi-def videos stutter and freeze, even the highest resolution stuff on YouTube is unplayable. If I’m browsing the web I can barely do anything else–1 tab and some downloads in the background are taxing.

This is caused by three things: the CPU, the memory, and the video chip.

My CPU is a little guy, an Intel ATOM processor. One core, not two like my desktop–causing multitasking issues. And my 1 GB of memory is shared by both my OS and my video chip. This is a problem for things like gaming and watching nice videos.

Netbooks were a good choice for most people two years ago. But these days mobile phones like the iPhone and Androids are so feature rich and powerful that it’s taken the place of netbooks. The Droid X on Verizon or the Evo on Sprint have large, beautiful screens and capable processors. These phones are plenty good enough for the average ‘net user.

I now realize that I never wanted a netbook. What I really wanted was a small, lightweight laptop. Because I need a lot more power.

Hey. Alienware m11x! I’m looking at you.