The Case Against N450 Netbooks

Chance Stevens 29 January 2010 821 views View Comments

Since CES 2010 a deluge of netbooks with Intel’s latest N450 processor have been making their way to store shelves and in stock at online retailers all over the world. While it’s easy to decide to buy new technology for the sake of it being new it seems that for what you get you make more sacrifices than you get in terms of benefit. There appears to be a strong case for not buying a N450 netbook and instead paying more attention to the previous generations of netbook which were powered by Intel’s N270 and N280 processor.

From a price standpoint, older N2XX netbook are now significantly cheaper than their N450 counterparts. For example, you can get an Asus 1005HA netbook with a 3-cell battery for $250. A version with an updated processor costs at least $50 and in some instances the gap between older and newer exceeds $100. There are also limitation to upgrades and tweaks.

Much has been made of the hackintosh movement where Apple’s OS X has been installed on Intel Atom based netbooks. This comes as many were looking for Apple to produce their own netbook and when they didn’t people decided to make their own. While the N270/N280 processors paired with 945 graphics are largely capable of this update the option no longer exists with N450 processors because of their 3150 graphics. Most of the people who have netbooks are likely to not go down this road but not wanting to do something is much different from not being able to.

Utilities like GMABooster were designed with the Intel N2XX series of processors and their graphics in mind. Owners of newer netbooks don’t have such programs available which make it more difficult to play video smoothly, and improve functionality in other ways.

Graphics take another hit with the limitation Intel imposed prevent manufacturers from combining N450 with Nvidia’s ION graphics. ION graphics are nothing more than a dumbed down version of the 9400M video card paired with HDMI output to allow people to easily stream content from their netbook to their HDTV.

One of the compromises made when considering an older netbook is the operating system. Many of the older netbooks do not come with Microsoft’s Window 7 Starter. Windows 7 is Microsoft’s latest operating system and has lots of innovations built into it. For some people, netbooks with Windows 7 are able to play video much smoother than netbooks with XP. Windows XP netbook users aren’t completely stuck as there are lots of codecs available to improve video playing.

Millions of dollars are being spent to promote and market Intel’s new netbooks. I’ve tried out several and while the experience is similar to what you’d find on older netbooks there are tradeoffs. Most people won’t care much for what they’re missing out on but for the tinkers, tweaker, or generally curious gadget buyer getting the older the better.

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