Low Price Samsung NC10-14GB 10.2-Inch Blue Netbook - 6 Cell Battery

I tried the Acer Aspire One to fill my netbook needs. The Aspire One is a 5-star machine, but the keyboard is simply too small for my hands.

I next tried the Samsung NC10 - and am very pleased. The NC10 is an extremely competent machine in a very compact, lightweight package.

I won't go deeply into the specs: they are well known and readily available.

Thee are a number factors that please me so much about the Samsung NC10. The 10.2" is bright and sharp, though the oddball resolution of 1024 x 600 is a bit inconvient from time to time. The much criticized touchpad isn't all that bad, but it is far from ideal. It is barely usable, but it does work and you get better with it the more you use it.

Audio through the onboard speakers is fair. Don't try using it in a room with even a moderate amount of noise - the internal speakers will be swamped. Frequency coverage of the internal speakers is what you would expect:" mediocre. Headphone listening is more than adequate - and the built-in Bluetooth is a blessing with Bluetooth headphones.

The built-in webcam is surprisingly good, delivering an image that puts that of the built-in webcam on my Dell to shame - though, admittedly, that is not a major challenge.

Where this unit really shines and two of the factors that make it such a winner are the keyboard and the battery.

The keyboard is almost full-sized. The important keys like Enter and Shift feel full-sized. Even with my large fingers, I can type rapidly with few errors. On the Aspire One, I was tripping all over myself. The function keys are reduced size, but this doesn't cause a problem.

Samsung claims the battery is good for eight hours. Not unexpecteldy, I haven't acheived eight hours yet - but six hours running time is a snap. Add a spare battery or two to your pack and you're good for a very long day of portable computing. The six-cell batteries, by the way, are pretty light.

I haven't used the NC10 for any heavy duty applications yet, like photo editing or voice recognition, but for normal things like browsing and word processing, the 1.6Ghz Atom processor seems adequate. I did upgade my RAM to 2GB just because I prefer as much RAM as I can get. I didn't notice any performance improvment so far and, considering what I have been using the machine for, I wouldn't expect to.

Best of all, the NC10 is light. Even with my old shoulders and my old back, I can tote the NC10, an extra battery, mouse, headset and power adapter without problem.

I've only tried the Aspire One and the Samsung NC10 so I can't speak widely of netbooks. I can confidently say, though, that the NC10 is a well engineered and well built machine that will satisfy anyone's reasonable netbook requirments. It is a terrific little computer.

JerryGet more detail about Samsung NC10-14GB 10.2-Inch Blue Netbook - 6 Cell Battery.

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I was all set to get the Asus eeePC1000HA netbook until I heard about this new Samsung, spent a day reading up about it---nothing but rave reviews from both professional reviewers and owners. After a bit of hemming and hawing over the seventy dollar price increase over the Asus, I chose the Samsung due to the longer battery life and the keyboard having a proper right shift key (I touch type, so that's really important). I chose the white color just because I haven't owned a white computer since the late 1980s when I had a Macintosh Classic! Also while I liked the look of the blue and black models, I didn't want to bother with wiping fingerprints all the time, and the idea of the keys being more visible under low-light conditions was also appealing.

So, about a week later, am extremely happy with the NC10. Two things which the reviews I read made sound very bad on this thing, turned out to be really not bad at all: the speakers and the touchpad. I actually prefer the touchpad on the NC10 to that of most other laptops I've used, in fact! Enough for me to consider not using an external mouse most of the time like I've always done with every laptop I've ever had---I figure that the more stuff I plug into the USB slots, the more drain on the battery. The speakers were fine, I wasn't expecting high fidelity or anything, just functional enough for me to occasionally listen to newscasts or YouTube, perhaps a little background music while surfing or working once in a while.

Build quality is excellent. I ran a monitor test and couldn't find any "blotching" on the screen that some users complained of, it's a very pleasant screen to look at. The latch on the lid is not as stiff as I would prefer, but isn't totally flimsy either. And though I generally dislike bling, I have to say that the chrome accent running around the edge of the NC10 is quite attractive-looking. Oh, and contrary to what online photos might suggest, the "white" color is actually more ivory or off-white.

I love that you get to choose whether to partition the HDD when you first start up the NC10, and if yes you can choose the size of the two partitions. I set my primary partition to 30GB and the remainder will be used for docs and music and photos. Unlike many computers these days, Samsung does not load down this little baby with bloatware, other than McAfee which I immediately removed (first using Windows removal tool, then you download a specialized McAfee remover off Google to wipe away the last vestiges). I also took out most of the Samsung software, and using a wonderful list of tweaks to be found at the excellent sammynetbook dot com forum, leaned down Windows XP some more. Having installed a 2GB stick of memory from the get-go, I disabled virtual memory which not only increases speed but saves battery life because the HDD is used a lot less, and lastly I disabled Bluetooth which is another significant battery drain. Now my NC10's running faster than my Pentium 4 desktop and my Centrino full-sized laptop!

At the four fifty I paid for it, the NC10 is only a hundred or so bucks cheaper than a full size, dual-core laptop from Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc. However for my needs (word proc, Internet, spreadsheets, photos, music, zero gaming) I simply don't need all the bulk which that extra processing power requires, and the battery life of this Samsung is currently unrivaled among all netbooks---the Asus is its closest competitor, but the other netbooks on the market, especially the otherwise very good MSI Wind and Lenovo S10, have only 1/2 to 1/3 as much battery life as this one. I tried out every netbook Best Buy carries, including the Acer Aspire One (which was deadly slow even after I switched XP over to "maximize performance" mode and turned off all the graphical bells and whistles), Asus 8.9" ones (cramped/weirdish keyboards, Linux only, SSDs only), HPs (nice screens, terrible flat-clicking keyboards), MSI Wind (fine except for the low battery life). The NC10 gives me about 6 hours of battery life without dimming the screen, an additional 1-1.5 hours if I turn off the WiFi (something I do when only using Word and Excel).

If Samsung would only get this thing distributed to the major retail stores like Best Buy, Target, etc. this thing would probably sell like hotcakes, because there's nothing else out there which offers the same feature set at this pricepoint.

Lightness, compactness, and hellacious battery life...thank you thank you thank you, Samsung!

PS. For those of you concerned by the lack of CD/DVD drive or burner, you can buy a USB external CD/DVD burner for fifty to a hundred bucks. I recommend newegg dot com, do a search there.

PPS. Another way to lean down your PC: remove Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader, particularly if you have version 9.0, because it is an outrageous resource hog, on par with McAfee and Norton. Download and install the freeware Foxit Reader 3.0 which is about 1/10th the size, for reading PDF files. If you need to create PDF files, there is the PrimoPDF freeware. I found that my NC10 as well as all my other computers sped up quite a bit with both Adobe softwares gone, especially Firefox!

UPDATE 2/12/09: from the aforementioned sammynetbook.com forum, a great tip for maximizing the speakers' performance: Control Panel -> Realtek Sound Manager, 1. uncheck the karaoke voice cancellation if it's on, 2. make sure the karaoke is at zero level, and 3. put all EQ frequencies on max. It baffles me that Samsung would allow this machine to arrive with such a lousy sound setting...now I understand why some people were complaining so much about the speakers!Get more detail about Samsung NC10-14GB 10.2-Inch Blue Netbook - 6 Cell Battery.