My comp got f'd

[CSamurai]

Would a laptop of same price, perform better than a net book?

Maaaaaybe? netbook OSes tend to be fairly streamlined, especially in the unix variety, improving performance. Your average cheap laptop comes with a great deal of cruft that will require cleaning before it runs well. Also, it depends on the specs of the laptop you can get for under 500 dollars. I like netbooks because they do as much light computing as an average user needs (plays videos, browses web, runs chat programs, etc) and are excedingly portable with very long battery life times.

It's really hard for me to give you a definitive answer above. It depends a lot on the specs of the laptop. The straightforward answer is, better hardware performs better than lesser hardware, but the user may never notice.

Most programs are written to run on considerably less power than is available in modern computers. Games, high end graphical processing, and high volume data processing being the exception. So, unless you plan to play videogames, run a rendering engine, or crunch the numbers from your latest LHC experiment.. You're likely fine with a netbook, may see minor increases in snappyness from a laptop, and can do all those things with my desktop, but not for 500 dollars.

[Mike Novack]

Most programs are written to run on considerably less power than is available in modern computers. Games, high end graphical processing, and high volume data processing being the exception. So, unless you plan to play videogames, run a rendering engine, or crunch the numbers from your latest LHC experiment.. You're likely fine with a netbook, may see minor increases in snappyness from a laptop, and can do all those things with my desktop, but not for 500 dollars.

But this is a go forum and so the performance of go playing software should be a consideration. Possibly not keeping in mind the "crunch power" of the machine or lack thereof is one of the sources of disappointment "the program isn't nearly as strong as claimed to be" (that was a claim of strenth based on using what amount of computer power?). Client software to enable you to play via one of the go servers would work just fine on a netbook but software to be able to play against the computer itself, no.

[hyperpape]

"Mike", it should be a consideration only if the player is interested. And my hunch is that the proportion of players who care about how strong bots will be on their computer is substantially smaller than the percentage who care about video performance, keeping ten browser tabs open at once and so on.

[oren]

Would a laptop of same price, perform better than a net book?

Impossible to say without specs. You can get older laptops for the same price, but netbooks will outperform those.

[chef]

Thanks alot guys. This has been really helpful. I'm thinking i'm leaning towards a netbook after what I've read. I really don't need for much for than making documents (which I use google docs for anyways), watching videos and maybe playing some 8-bit nintendo off of an emulator and surfing the net. I'll let you guys know what I've decided