The 10 Things You Must Do First with Every New Netbook

It’s the holiday season, the time for giving and receiving gifts. If one of those gifts turns out to be a netbook–an inexpensive, ultraportable notebook computer–then you’ve got some work ahead of you. To get the most out of your new netbook, there are a number of tweaks and upgrades you’ll want to perform. In this netbook starter guide, we show you 10essential things you should do after powering up your system for the first time. This checklist will save you from worrysome troubleshootingin the future and ensure that you make the most out of your portable companion computer.

1. Upgrade the Hardware

If you’re looking to give your netbook a little more juice, there’s nothing that works better than a quick hardware upgrade. Here are three things you should think about upgrading on any new laptop, and especially netbooks.

RAM

In terms of bang for your buck, a memory upgrade is almost always your best option. For relatively little (you can get a 2GB stick of DDR2 RAM for under $50), you can double your netbook’s memory, which will usually mean a very noticeable increase in speed.

Hard Drive

If you’re looking for faster startup and program launching, you may want to consider upgrading your netbook’s HDD to an SDD. 64GB SDDs are available for around $150, and should be plenty of storage for your OS, apps, and a smattering of media. If you only plan to use your netbook for web-browsing and word processing, you can get by with a 32GB SSD, which run around $100.

In either case, consider investing in a 2.5” external hard drive, which will provide you with all the media-storing capabilities at a low cost per gigabyte.

2. Trim the Fat from Windows

Although we always recommend that our readers build their own PCs, that’s simply not an option with netbooks. Unfortunately, that means that with a netbook you have to put up with the inconveniences of a retail computer, including bloatware.

Bloatware is software that is useless near-useless, which companies pay system-builders to include on their machines. It can include media players, toolbars, and trial subscriptions to online services. In reality, all they do is slow down your machine.

But don’t fear, because it is possible to carefully excise all the unwanted software from your machine. To find out more, check out our guide about how to decrapify your PC.

Of course, if you happen to have an extra Windows install disc and your netbook came with a Windows serial number, it’s always best to simply do a clean install of Windows. Check out our guide on using Vlite to install a stripped-down version of Windows.

3. Install Essential Apps and Utilities

Having a clean OS is great, but in order to actually do anything, you’ll need to install some software. Here’s our recommendations for applications and utilities:

Apps

To get the most out of your new netbook, you’ll need some applications—those bits of software that actually do things. In the past, we’ve compiled a list of 32 essential applications which we love. Of course, on a netbook you don’t want a whole bunch of applications, so check out the list and pick a few that you like. Here’s some that we think are great for netbooks:

• Skype
• Firefox
• OpenOffice.org
• VLC Media Player
• Picassa

Utilities

In addition to normal applications, there are many utilities—programs designed to make your computer more efficient, organized and powerful—that are worth checking out. Again, we’ve got a list for you to peruse, so hit it up, paying special attention to these netbook recommendations.

• WinDirStat
• 7-Zip
• Truecrypt
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• KeePass

4. Sync with Your PC

A netbook is not meant to be a primary computer, or even a secondary computer, necessarily. Instead, they serve as a great, highly mobile compliment to your desktop and laptop. In order to work together with your primary PC, it’ll help to set up certain synching services on your netbook to keep it running in tandem with your main PC. Here are several services that we recommend:

Documents

For managing your documents across multiple computers, we recommend Dropbox, king of all synching software. Just download Dropbox here, and install it on each computer you use. You can choose where you want your sync folder to be installed, and if you want, set your My Documents folder location to that of your Dropbox. Just like that, any documents you save on one computer become available on all of them.

Mail

For keeping your inbox synched across multiple clients, our recommendation is, as always, just to bite the bullet, ditch you mail client and make the move to Gmail. If you’re attached to your old email addresses, check out these resources about using Gmail to get messages from POP accounts and forwarding other webmail accounts to gmail.

IM

An IM client can be one of the most fundamental links to everyone you know online. Unfortunately, if you regularly use multiple machines, it can be hard to make sure that you have the same contacts on each computer. For that we recommend Digsby, a feature-packed multi-service IM client that stores all your contacts and setting in a single cloud-based account, so no matter what computer you log in from, you’ll see the same messenger client.
If you don’t like the Digsby interface, you can also learn how to use Dropbox to sync a Piginat our list of Dropbox mashups.

5. Tweak the Windows UI

Here are a couple of tips for making the most of a small screen.

Increase icon size

On a netbook you’re likely to have a few programs that you use regularly. Rather then strain your eyes trying to pick these out of a normal-scale start menu or taskbar, crank up the icon size and leave only your most-used programs on your desktop. To increase icon size, simply right-click on the desktop, and select View -> Large Icons.

Run Firefox in fullscreen mode

One of the best ways to get more browsing real-estate with Firefox is to use fullscreen mode, which gets rid of the borders and bars at the top and bottom of the screen. To activate fullscreen mode, just hit f11 when you start the program.

6. Get Power Efficient

As previously mentioned, one of the strongpoints of a netbook is in its portability: you can take it with you anywhere—as long as the battery holds out. Fortunately, there are ways to increase your battery lifespan, just by making a few simply changes.

Power settings

Visit your netbook’s Power Options menu and select the “Power saver” plan for longer battery life. Power Options is found in the control panel. You can also lower your screen brightness in this window, which is another good way to save your battery.

Turn off Aero

If you don’t mind suffering with an uglier OS, kill Aero Glass to lighten the load on your processor and save your battery some trouble. Just right click on your desktop, then click Personalize. Scroll down in the personalization menu, and select Windows 7 Basic or Windows Classic as your theme.

Unplug your peripherals

Plugged-in peripherals drain power from your battery, so make sure not to leave mobile hard drives, mice, or speakers plugged in

7. Set up Remote Computing

Just because your netbook doesn’t have the power of your desktop PC doesn’t mean you can’t use that power from your netbook. Using remote desktop software, you can use your netbook as a mobile client for you desktop, logging into it and controlling it from the road. Of course, since you’re communicating with it over the internet, it’s nowhere near as smooth as operating the computer directly, but it’ll get the job done. To learn how to remotely control your desktop with VNC and Himachi, check out our How-To.

8. Install Some Netbook-friendly Games

Torchlight

Torchlight, the first game by Runic Games, founded by Blizzard veterans, is a faithful, well executed Diablo-clone. The click-based hack n’ slash gameplay isn’t terrifically original, but the low-poly graphics are nicely designed and perfect for playing on an underpowered netbook.

Plants vs. Zombies

Plants vs. Zombies manages to combine two of our favorite things: zombies, and tower defense. If you’re a fan of either genre (and hell, even if you’re not) you owe it to yourself to give Plants vs. Zombies a try. Addictive gameplay and Popcap’s charming 2D visuals make this game an excellent choice for play on a netbook.

9. Turn Your Netbook into a Media Streamer

Netbooks are great for productivity, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get some entertainment value out of them as well. Desktop media players like VLC or Media Player Classic are a must, but given a netbook’s small screen, it makes more sense to run media playback software that replaces the Windows desktop UI.  You’ll also want to get access to internet video feeds like Youtube and Hulu without playing them in a browser window.

Boxee and XBMC are excellent media frontends that give you quick access to locally stored photos, music, and movies, while also able to tap into internet content. Hulu Desktop is also recommended if you just want to watch content from Hulu. You should also invest in a sizable USB key or portable hard drive to store local video files.

If your new netbook is Ion-powered (ie. An HP Mini 311 or Asus 1201), media playback software will also let you turn the netbook into a pretty powerful HTPC. Just connect the netbook into your home theater system with a HDMI cable and watch GPU accelerated high-definition Vimeo or YouTube videos on your big screen TV.

10. Dual-Boot into a Linux OS

One last thing you should consider doing to your netbook is installing a second OS. We stand by Windows 7 as a great netbook operating system (because of all the programs you can install on it), but admit that its interface isn’t optimized for extremely casual uses like twitter and photo slideshows. That’s where a netbook-specific OS comes in.

The Moblin operating system is our current favorite netbook OS. Founded by Intel and subsequently turned over to the Linux Foundation, Moblin excels in its simplicity—most of the space on its desktop is devoted to displaying content like images or a webpage (on an optimized browser), while a right-aligned sidebar lists social network updates.

We recommend trying out Moblin’s live image from a USB key before committing to it. And if you’re sold on Moblin, we still think it’s best to install it as a dual-boot option in case you ever need to get into Windows to use more powerful apps.