6. Netbooks

Netbooks are much smaller in size and weight than a traditional laptop. They still have an integral keyboard, touchpad and attached screen but they are specifically designed to be ultra lightweight and small enough to carry in one hand.

Netbooks are typically around 10 inches in size (diagonally across the screen) but they are becoming increasingly smaller as technology advances.

Unlike a laptop, they may not have a traditional hard disk to store the operating system, applications and data. Instead they may use flash memory (see mini website on memory) instead (some netbooks do have a hard disk). This means that they don't have as much storage capacity, with many netbooks having 20-120GB of storage whereas most laptops will have 120 GB up to 1TB of hard disk space.

Also, they may have less RAM than a laptop, with many having between 512MB and 1GB, compared to a laptop's 1-2GB of RAM. This means that they are slower at processing data than a laptop or PC but battery life is longer. The real difference comes with very data-intensive aplications such as games.