Netbooks are equipped with low power consumption hardware to help them have a longer battery life. This selection also leaves them comparatively slower against the modern laptops and desktops (for example, a single core 1.6 Gigahertz Atom processor compared to a dual-core 2.0 Gigahertz.) Of course there are several reasons:
- The form factor of netbooks is small compared to most laptops.
- The small form factor of netbooks does not allow a large battery to be used, which means that intensive CPU usage can drain the battery very quickly.
- Notebooks are optimized for running mainstream business applications like Microsoft Office, antivirus, and accessing the Internet and instant messaging applications simultaneously, and this does not impact the battery use drastically.
- The screen size for both netbooks and (most) notebooks are smaller than most desktop setups, but both can handle the majority of everyday applications used by a mobile office worker.
- The screen size and the hardware of both netbooks and most notebooks is not suitable for complex applications such as image editing beyond basics, video encoding and transcoding, and 3D applications, etc.
If you are a Bright Hub reader you will realize that we will not accept these as constraints to our use and will try to squeeze all the power that comes with our netbook. The main idea will be to use portable applications. The reason behind this is mainly the Windows registry. As we all know, installing an application on a Windows box inserts many entries to the registry and the growing size of the registry causes longer booting times, slower overall performance and finally possible crashes. Imagine that an OpenOffice.org installation creates about 16,000 (yes sixteen thousand) entries in the registry, whereas portable OpenOffice.org will create no entry.
The portable applications relieve you from the install-try-uninstall-clean-tune cycle. You will install a program, try to work with it, if unsuccessful uninstall it, manually clean the remaining files, and run the tune-up program to deep clean the rest. There is no need for all this. You will have an executable file, so you will just double-click and run it. If you want to uninstall, simply delete the exe file.
In this article, we will go through the main applications that you can replace with the common, well-known ones. I will provide the links that point you to the download sites throughout the article.
The first ones we'll look at are office, e-mail, personal information management, and web browsing applications.