Don’t get alarmed.  I don’t mean to be the one to rain on the parade of people who either have a netbook or might be shopping for one but you have to consider a refurbished laptop.  Refurbished isn’t bad, it just means that someone loved it before you got it.  It’s no different than when you buy a used car, but you’re going to get a lot more use out of it.

When you figure that the hottest netbooks out there sell for $379 – $449.  For that price, you’re going to get an 11 or 12 inch netbook with 1.6 Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive.  Most importantly you won’t have a CD or DVD drive unless you decide to invest an extra $50+ dollars to have an external drive.  The saving grace in all this is that all of this will weigh around 3 lbs.

Now if you consider what’s out there in the way of laptops your decision isn’t as easy anymore.  Big companies like Dell and Lenovo sell their laptops by the hundred to big corporations for a fixed amount of time.  Once the computers are done being leased they get turned over to get sold in online outlets.  Dell has several notebooks from $279 which will have a Pentium Mobile processor 1.7 Ghz processor, CD/DVD burner, 120GB hard drive, and at least a 14 inch screen.  For $350 you can get a 2.0 Ghz Dual Core processor with a 250 GB hard drive 15.4 inch screen, 2GB of RAM, and a six cell battery.

Dell – Off lease Dell notebooks

Lenovo – Laptop outlet

Do you still feel as confident about buy a netbook over a laptop?

1. Lenovo IdeaPad Netbook 10″ – $409

2. Netbooks Invade Bangladesh’s Zoom Laptop Fair 2010

3. Netbook Prices Continue To Plunge

4. AMD Dual Core X100e Netbook Shows Face, High Price

5. Dell’s Confusing Netbook Strategy