Question on Notebooks:

I've been comparing some of the new 11.6-inch Netbooks hitting the market and have been a bit confused. Some examples include the HP Mini 311 with Atom and Ion, as well as the Acer 1810TZ, which features a dual-core CULV processor. Both have pretty long battery life, but I'm not sure how they would perform against one another.

Submitted by George, via email

Answer:

To put it bluntly, no amount of GPU power can substitute for the weak Atom processor. As such, though the Mini 311's Ion platform allows it to play HD videos and certain older games, heavy Flash sites and multimedia rendering will still bring the machine to its knees.

For such purposes, the CULV processor is slightly better. Though it's still a stretch to use it for HD video editing, it can certainly run Flash Web sites batter than its Atom counterpart. Moreover, the Centrino 2 platform is more than competent when it comes to HD videos. The flip side is that CULV machines cost almost twice as much as an Atom equivalent.