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Samsung NC10-14GB 10.2-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 6 Cell Battery, XP Home)

List Price: $499.00
Price: $477.95 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
You Save: $21.05 (4%)

Rating: (89 reviews)

Staying connected 24/7. It’s what matters to you. That’s why Samsung
introduced the new NC10 netbook. Weighing just 2.9 pounds, it’s designed to keep you online and on the go. Experience the freedom to surf the Web, shop and chat on IM with the latest wireless technology. Zip through your online applications with a speedy new Intel Atom processor. Store all your favorite videos, music, images and more with 160GB of storage, and enjoy them on a SuperBright 10.2-inch LCD. And with up to 8 hours of battery life, the NC10 brings you staying power.

Details

* 10.2″ Wide, 1024 x 600 WSVGA , 220 nits
* Intel Atom processor N270, 1.6 GHz, 533 MHz Front Side Bus, 512 KB Level 2 Cache
* 160 GB, 2.5” HD, 1 GB DDR2 800 MHz
* Intel 945GSE shared, 802.11 b/g WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, 10/100 BaseTX LAN
* 6-Cell Lithium Ion, Genuine Microsoft XP® Home with Service Pack 3, 1.3 Mega Pixel webcam, Kensington Key Lock, 1 year standard parts and labor, 2.8 lbs

Key Features

Ultra-long battery life:
Delivering up to 8 hours of battery life, the NC10 will let you surf the Web to your heart’s delight.

Intel Atom processor technology:
Newly designed from the ground up, the Intel Atom processors pack an astounding 47 million
transistors on a single chip, delivering the power you need for full Internet capabilities.

Large LCD display:
With its SuperBright industry-leading 10.2-inch wide LCD, you can view the Internet, or any application, in full screen without compromise and in a clear and comfortable display.

Customer Reviews:

The perfect lightweight laptop, January 12, 2009
by E. H. Perry (CA USA)
I researched netbooks and asked for the Samsung as a Christmas present. It has barely left my hands since then. I was a bit worried about the short screen height, but it isn’t usually an issue. The keyboard is fantastic. A piano-playing friend finds the keys too small for his hands; for my smaller female hands it’s perfect and takes surprisingly little adaptation, the biggest problem being the placement of the page up/page down keys. I am not happy with the touchpad (too close to the keyboard) and will be buying an external mouse, I think.

I use the NC10 entirely to surf the Net and run OpenOffice; for those needs, it’s perfect. It wakes up from hibernation very quickly. Everybody I show it to wants one.

Great Battery Life and Excellent Size Keyboard, January 11, 2009
By RLC “GrassShopper” (California)
I really love my little netbook (small notebook as some manufacturer’s would rather call it).
To reiterate what I stated in the video, here are the main points:

1. Excellent sized keyboard at 93% of full sized version. (MSI is comparable, but the shift key among other things aren’t quite as natural as the NC10. ie: shift key on MSI is more to the left instead of directly underneath the Enter key like the NC10). NC10 by far to me has the most natural keyboard for touch typists.

2. Superb long life battery. Up to eight hours, and around 5.5 hours of heavy use battery life. I gave it a heavy test by running multiple programs in the background while running streaming and got 5.5hrs with 20 minutes left on the battery. (The MSI at Best gets around 5 hours) Netbooks are supposed to be for “portability” and if your netbook can’t get a decent charge and sustain it, that pretty much takes away it’s ability to do so.

I realize it’s personal preference, and I’m sure the MSI is a great item too, but these reasons to me make a big difference.

A note in the video about the NC10. So far they have released three colors in the NC10. Here are my 2 cents. Get the white (kind of a pearl subtle metallic silvery color as you can see in the video). The black and the blue are incredibly pretty, but they’ve got a high gloss finish. High gloss finish = fingerprint purgatory. If you can’t keep it smudge free, it takes away it’s

Excellent little machine, November 21, 2008
By Thomas A. Puzio

OVERVIEW
Let me start by saying I wanted the blue one because I felt like white would be too cheap looking. White isn’t my first choice for a laptop color, but i think this is passable. I decided to take the white one rather than wait around for whenever the blue one is released.

I love this machine. The day-to-day tasks are peppy and it behaves like a normal Windows XP machine. I have purchased a RAM upgrade and am waiting for my 2GB stick to arrive, but I have been using it with the 1GB installed and haven’t had any issues. The main uses for this machine I see are internet, office, and other such basic tasks. However, I also maintain a couple websites and was able to install Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 and noticed no difference in performance on this machine from my powerful desktop.

The fit and finish are excellent. Keyboard keys are sturdy and snappy. The USB ports are tight, in a good way, and provide a sense of quality when you plug things in. The screen is bright, bright enough that I often dim it a notch or two due to eye fatigue (which is normally not a problem for me).

CONS
Trying to find faults in this machine is like trying to find faults in a BMW 7 series, sure there are nit-picky things you can point out, but come on, it’s a 7 series! Having said that…

Screen size. This being my first netbook the size of the screen takes a little getting used to. My problem with the screen is that it is slightly too short in height. To combat this I simply made my taskbar autohide, what I normally do not do, but without this, the main window pane seemed pinched what with the menu bars, tool bars, and task bar taking up roughly 1 inch of screen real estate.

Touch pad. The touch pad is pretty short (up and down) so some adjustments needed to be made to the pointer speed and momentum to get it up and down without retreading over and over. Ultimately I find it much easier to just use a wireless mouse (I’d recommend the Logitech VX Nano). What I wish is that Samsung had used the extra space above and below the touchpad to simply increase its size. If it were 1/4″ taller the touchpad would be just fine.

Weight. It is light, but because it’s small it seems dense. This means for me that its weight/size ratio means that it feels heavy. By no means would I say it is heavy, but i think it is heavier than it may appear at first glance. It is still very light for a laptop, even lighter than the Macbook Air (albeit a smaller form factor).

PROS
Speed. Speedy laptop. It gets the job done.

Battery. I tested it out today. I teach high school and used this laptop to take attendance and record grades in each of my classes. I started it up around 7:50am and had it turned on most of the day. Periodically I would put it in sleep mode, or allow the power save mode to turn off the lcd. I also turned off the backlight when I got up to walk away from time-to-time. However, the NC10 made it from 8am all the way to 3pm without shutting down due to lack of power. And I had the backlight on 6 or 7 out of 8 the entire time and I had to connect to the internet on a regular basis so wifi was on the entire time. I am confident that if I took this on a plane with me I could play 2 or 3 movies before my battery dies. This was a huge selling point for me. Most other netbooks have similar features but many lack the 6-cell battery.

Hard drive. The response time is peppy. No noticible lag when accessing the hard drive or save large files. Having 160GB hard drive is important to me. I also plan on adding 32GB via a SD card for additional storage. With all the windows updates, office 2003, macromedia suite 8, and various other applications, along with 30 gb of music, I have about 100GB left over for data.

CUSTOMIZING IT
As with all laptops, this one comes preinstalled with a bunch of stuff you may or may not want. I like more control than some of these applications offer. Also, the computer starts out by partitioning the hard drive to split it in half. You can control how much you want to assign to each partition, and it says you can even set it to eliminate the partitioning, but I was unable to figure this out. When I went through the process I couldn’t get mine to leave it as one big drive. So it ended up splitting it in half. After I did this I decided I didn’t like it that way and wanted to fix it.

Here’s what I did:
1. With the help of an external DVD drive, I put the recovery disk in (while logged in to windows) and gave it the option to reinstall windows
2. It started the process and then rebooted and then I had the option to boot from a disk. I did that and the computer stopped at the typical Windows XP installation interface.
3. From there I was able to delete the D partition and the small, hidden recovery partition (about 6 gb) to allow the C partition to take over all 160gb of the hard drive
4. I deleted the C partition and then reformatted it as one drive
5. Then it installed windows to the new C drive
6. Followed setup process and voila! New clean Windows XP machine
7. Once i was back in windows I put in the software disk that has all the samsung programs and installed those which I wanted. It’s important to install the video and audio drivers so the function keys work with the speaker volume and backlight controls.
8. Finished by installing whatever applications I wanted and updating windows and office

enjoy.

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