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But by far the most common laptop pointing device found today is the touchpad (Figure 21-2)—a flat, touch-sensitive pad just in front of the keyboard. To operate a touchpad, you simply glide your finger across its surface to move the pointer, and tap the surface once or twice to single- or double-click. You can also click by using buttons just below the pad. Most people get the hang of this technique after just a few minutes of practice. The main advantage of the touchpad over previous laptop pointing devices is that it uses no moving parts—a fact that can really extend the life of a hard-working laptop. Some modern laptops actually provide both a TrackPoint-type device and a touchpad, to give the user a choice.

Figure 21-2 Touchpad on a laptop

Desktop Extenders

Manufacturers offer desktop extender portable devices that don’t replace the desktop but rather extend it by giving you a subset of features of the typical desktop that you can take away from the desk. Figure 21-3 shows a portable with a good, but small, 13.3-inch wide screen. The system has 2 GB of RAM, a 2-GHz processor, a 60-GB hard drive, and a battery that enables you to do work on it for more than five hours while disconnected from the wall socket. Even though it plays music and has a couple of decent tiny speakers, you can’t game on this computer (Solitaire, perhaps, but definitely not Crysis!). But it weighs only five pounds, nearly half the weight of the typical desktop replacement portable.

Figure 21-3 Excellent mid-sized portable computer

Before you get excited about a mere five-pound laptop, know that the numbers can lie. Manufacturers advertise the weight of portable PCs, for the most part, without the weight of the battery or the removable drives. Although this deception is deplorable, it’s pretty much universal in the industry because no manufacturer wants to be the first to say that their desktop-replacement portable, including battery and DVD-RW drive, weighs 15 pounds, when their competitor advertises the same kind of machine at 7.5 pounds! They’d lose market share quickly.

So when you shop or recommend portable PCs, take the real weight into consideration. By the time you fill your laptop bag with a power adapter, external mouse, spare battery, and all the extra accessories, you’ll definitely be carrying more than the advertised 5–6 pounds.

Desktop extenders enable you to go mobile. When I’m on a roll writing, for example, I don’t want to stop. But sometimes I do want to take a break from the office and stroll over to my favorite café for a latté or a pint of fine ale. At moments like these, I don’t need a fully featured laptop with a monster 15-inch or 17-inch screen, but just a good word processing system—and perhaps the ability to surf the Internet on the café’s wireless network so I can goof off research other important topics once I finish my project for the day. A lightweight laptop with a 12-inch or 13-inch screen, a reasonably fast processor, and gobs of RAM does nicely.

Netbooks

Netbooks are computers that fill the gap between PDAs and the smaller laptops. These machines usually have displays in the 6- to 10-inch range, modest-sized hard drives, and CPUs geared more for minimal power usage than raw speed. With netbooks, the focus is on small and low priced compared to their more full-featured cousins. This segment of the market is ever evolving, though, and there is quite a bit a blurring between the various classes of laptops.

A prime example of the netbook is the Asus Eee PC, shown in Figure 21-4 sitting on a full-sized laptop. This netbook has a 9-inch screen, a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom CPU, a small solid-state drive, and runs a customized Linux distribution. A key distinguishing feature of these netbooks is the use of Intel’s Atom processor. The Atom CPU is very useful for keeping power usage down but has much less computing power than its more power-hungry siblings. Therefore, most netbooks run either Windows