Netbooks Are Faster Now

Hybrid speed: NEC is releasing a new netbook that will utilize hybrid storage, the BL350 LaVie Light. The BL350 comes with both a standard 160-gigabyte hard disk drive and a more exotic 16-gigabyte solid-state drive. The idea of the hybrid approach is that by running the operating system and applications out of the SSD and using a larger capacity HDD for data storage you can boost the netbook's performance while keeping the costs down. This is because while SSDs work faster, they also cost much more than HDDs and speed is most important for running applications.



While NEC has addressed the memory issue, the other key speed bottlenecks remain in place. The BL350 has a standard 1.66-gigahertz Atom N280 chipset, good for economizing on power consumption but no speed demon, and the usual underwhelming 1 gigabyte of RAM. Beyond the processing innards, the BL350 comes with the new standard display for netbooks of a 10.1-inch screen with a 1024×600 resolution and Bluetooth. It has Windows XP home as the operating system. NEC provides an exceptional running time of up to 7.4 hours for a netbook of this screen size. It achieves this feat by employing a battery that sticks out prominently at the back of the otherwise sleek netbook.

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