It’s a tough choice deciding between the mobility of a laptop and the power of a desktop.
Laptop
The primary advantage of a laptop is mobility. You can take it with you from home to the office or school. For a student, nothing beats being able to bring along your laptop to the library or class. Taking notes, writing papers and doing research and being able to enter all your work immediately is definite plus.
Because everything is tightly built together, replacing damaged components or upgrading can be difficult. With the advent of USB, upgrading is less of an issue, because almost anything you might want to add can be added through USB. There are certain things which are essential to the functioning of a laptop that can’t be easily upgraded, though. The video card, monitor and the motherboard are all difficult to upgrade on a laptop, so be sure that you can live with what you buy at first.
The typical lifespan of a laptop is two years. If the monitor or the video card becomes damaged, it’s usually cheaper to replace than repair. Laptops are bumped around in bags and live in the wild world. They suffer more wear and tear than desktops. If you need or want a laptop, buy what you can afford to replace every few years. Being careful will keep your laptop in working shape longer, but on average, you’ll need to get something new more often.
Desktop
The advantage of a desktop is power and upgradeability. A desktop provides more power for less money than a laptop and it’s much easier to repair or upgrade a desktop. Adding a second hard drive or a new video card is relatively inexpensive and easy on a desktop. Video editing, photo editing or other tasks which require serious horsepower and storage are best performed on a desktop. If those are frequent tasks for you, then a desktop is a probably your best option unless money is no object and you can afford the latest and greatest in a laptop.
A desktop will usually last a typical user about 4-5 years. Because it’s easier to add a new video card, hard drive, optical drive (CD, DVD, Blu-ray), or memory, a desktop can keep up with your need for more power as your computing needs develop. If you weren’t into video editing when you bought a desktop, but later develop an interest in becoming the next Spielberg, just add a second hard drive and a better video card.
Netbook
A netbook is a new category of computer. It doesn’t come with a DVD or CD drive, the screen is very small compared to a laptop, and it comes with much less memory and storage than a typical laptop. It isn’t meant to be a full replacement for a laptop. It’s meant to be a small, portable machine that will do 90-95% of what a laptop could do. You wouldn’t want to try to do extensive video editing on a netbook, but for email, word processing and web surfing it could be just the thing. If you absolutely need a DVD burner, you can add an external drive via USB, which will allow your netbook to do everything your laptop would, but without quite so much horsepower.
If you need the power of a desktop, but you still want portability, then buying a netbook as a complement for a desktop might make sense. A netbook could also be a good option for a household where there aren’t enough computers to go around for everyone who wants to be surfing the net. This new category of machine is growing quickly in popularity, and the price is certainly right.
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I recently looked at the Netbook and thought it would be a good product for those who travel for their job, because it has wifi. Can you get a separate device for a USB port, in order to tap into Internet while travelling? Is there a home Internet server that includes the traveling connector for Internet wherever you go?
You can buy an adapter that plugs into a USB port that allows you to access the Internet when you’re away from home. It doesn’t allow you to access your home Internet, it allows you to access the Internet through Mobile Phone towers, so you can get Internet access wherever your phone works.
You can get one directly from your Mobile Phone company, and bundle it together with your plan for your mobile phone. That way you use some of the time off of your cell phone plan for Internet instead. There’s nothing on the market that would allow your computer to connect to your home Internet connection no matter how far you roam. At least, not that I’m aware of.