At first glance it appears that the Netbook craze may take over the laptop market. Many consumers are getting involved with Netbooks because of the portability and the cost efficiency of them.

In the economic downturn that exists, many products are losing sales as people tighten up their budgets. Laptop sales for example, are expect to fall by approximately 12 percent in 2009. In the meantime, Netbooks are actually experiencing a dramatic increase of sales. There are supposed to be nearly 21 million Netbooks that ship this year alone. To put that in perspective in terms of growth, that’s nearly double the number of Netbooks that was shipped last year.

Why the explosive growth you may ask? The biggest factor is the price point. Many companies are offering Netbooks at an extremely low cost. One example that you may have heard of is the 2 year plan through AT&T where you can get a Netbook for about $50.

While Netbooks seem to be the product everyone’s turning to, it’s unlikely that we’ll see laptops disappear. A Netbook may seem like a great investment at the time however after hours of use you’ll start to notice the downsides of a Netbook. Since the device is much smaller that means everything that you’re used to is going to be much smaller including the keyboard and screen. This can cause problems if you plan to use your Netbook for business or for extended periods of time as you may start to feel the anti-ergonomic effect of a Netbook.

The bottom line is that Netbooks are here to stay because of their inexpensiveness and their portability. However it’s unlikely that they’ll be the main use of portable devices by consumers that use laptops for work. If you are thinking about a Netbook you will want to weigh the cost effectiveness to the ergonomic disadvantage before you buy one.

Source: PC World

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Great advances have been made or achieved in hard drive design and architecture over the past 10 years. In case you haven’t noticed, hard disks are one of the few PC peripherals which you can immediately use without having to go through its manual. Of course, installing it can be quite tricky, but everything’s definitely smooth sailing after that.

As with any other PC component, hard drives will eventually reach that point when it won’t be able to retrieve or save data as efficiently as it used to be. This is especially true for data storage devise that are used in laptops. Laptop hard drives are more susceptible to damage or wear and tear because they are constantly being exposed to stress, such as shocks and jolts.

The Old Fashion Way

So how could you prolong the life of your hard drive? If you’re going to ask your parents or grandparents about this, chances are is that they’ll just give you a shrug. For old timers who know a thing or two about PCs, they might suggest methods or procedures which would seem logically sound, but is actually unnecessary and outdated already.

Take for example the common practice of leaving the computers on so as to protect the hard drive. Sounds absurd, huh? I mean, how could letting your hard drive spin needlessly for long number of hours be actually beneficial for your primary storage device?

Believe it or not, this was a sound and even necessary practice in order to stretch the mileage of the component. Subjecting the hard disk to frequent starts and stops back then actually meant exposing it to unnecessary and damaging stress. Hence, many were constrained to leave their computers on for long periods in order to prolong the lifespan of their disks.

It’s Safe to Turn It Off

This wasteful practice of having to leave your hard drive spinning even if you’re not using it is already a thing of the past. Hard drive manufacturers, such as Seagate and Samsung, already guarantee that their products would last around 5 years of more, regardless of whether you leave it spinning constantly or turn it on and off occasionally.

While storage makers can guarantee that constant shut downs would not affect the longevity of their products, other factors can definitely affect its mileage and performance. Heat is a problem that affects every computer component, especially hard disks. The longer your computer is turned or kept on, the greater the heat that it produces. Hence, it is definitely unwise to needlessly keep your computer on, especially when you’re not using it. Not only is this practice wasteful, but it is also damaging to your unit as well.

At Your Every Beck and Call

At a time when everything needs to be done at a heartbeat, it’s not surprising when users would opt to just leave their computers on so that they could immediately use it. Boot up time has tremendously improved over the past several years. However, one would still waste around 3-5 minutes on the start up stage alone. If you don’t want to be wasteful but would want your computer to be immediately available at just a second’s notice, then you might probably opt to just set your PC in standby mode whenever you’re not using it. You would still be wasting electricity on this mode, but the consumption is greatly reduced since power is cut to almost every computer component except the RAM.

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