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What are the advantages and disadvantages of switching to a laptop or netbook. This article will compare your average computer. There are a wide variety in each category, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. But in this article I focus on what is called mainstream computers, as oposed to enthusiast computers.

Lets begin with the laptop. I begin with the laptop because many people are considering switching from their desktops to a laptop, specially when their desktop needs repair. Is this a wise decision? Well, lets consider the benefits of switching from a desktop to a laptop. 

Obvious plus is portability. You can take your laptop with you and use it on battery charge for 2 to 4 hours on a single charge. Space saving is also an advantage. Laptop have the basic periferals – keyboard, mouse, speakers, and sometimes camera – in one package.

But there are drawbacks to having a laptop as your main computer. Laptops usually come with hard drives that have spinning disks (as oposed to solid state hard drives). These tend to crash more often than desktop hard drives. Moving a laptop while it is powered on is the culprit because a spinning disk wants to spin on the same plane, if you tilt the laptop, you increase the chance that the reading needle crashes with the disk. Desktops are stationary and are not tilted while powered on as often and therefore have a reduced risk of crashing the needle on the disk.

Overheating is also a problem. Laptops do not offer good airflow to dissipate the heat. Most of the vents are located on the bottom of the computer, which are sometimes blocked by objects -like pillows. Another source of overheating is dust build up. This should not be a problem if you use crompressed air to clean your laptop at least every 4 months. But people wait until its too late.

One big problem with some laptops that have a DC port directly soldered onto the motherboard, is that the DC port gets loose over time with use. The first symptom us an overheating charger or DC port, then the laptop stops charging unless the cable is held at an angle. Then it doesn’t work anymore, and the DC port has to be resoldered or replaced. Either way it is a costly repair.

And that brings me to the last disatvantage of laptops. Cost of repair. If the video card on your laptop fails, the motherboard has to be repaired or replaced. Sound card fails, same thing, the motherboard needs replacement. Camera fails… yeap. These repairs are significantly less costly on desktops, not to mention it takes less time to repair. Motherboard replacements on a laptop can take up to a month. Desktops can usually be repaired on-site.

There are other more technical advantages and disadvantages, like performance, multiscreen support, and  screen resolution. But these would fall under the enthusiast category.

Now what’s with all the hype about netbooks? Well, netbooks are a kind of laptop that is used mainly to access the net, hence the name. Netbooks don’t come with optical drives, so you cannot watch DVDs on them the way you would use a laptop or desktop. But I would not expect a netbook to be used as a main computer, unless all you do is access the internet and some word processing.

To epitomize, the decision to switch from a desktop to a laptop or netbook comes down to mobility and space vs. maintenace cost. The performance difference between desktops and laptops is minimal in the mainstream category and therefore don’t play an important role. If mobility and space is of importance, a laptop is for you. On the other hand if you want to keep maintenace cost to a minimum, a desktop is the choice.