Help please, very stupid question about netbooks from a total technophobe.

[Flibbertyjibbet]

Thinking of buying a netbook. They all say they come ready for wireless.
So, if we are with BT and I have an installation disc for my bt homehub that previously went into the (now broken) laptop to enable the laptop to 'recognise' our wireless...

Do the netbooks come with drive that I can put the disc into, if they don't all come with this then what are the techy words that I should look for on the specification,
Or if they don't come with them do I have to buy some kind of external disc drive,
Or do you just get a netbook and turn it on and it will pick up whatever wireless connection it can find?

(We are in a terraced house and at times have 3 neighbours wireless systems coming up when I log on!)

If none of this makes sense its because I know so little, that I don't even know the right questions to ask iyswim.

Any help would be much appreciated so that I don't waste money buying the wrong thing.

[purepurple]

you will probably have to put in the security code on your wireless router as it should recognise the wireless connection

i have orange and the key is on the bottom of the box

I have done this with my laptop a PS3 and a Wii and didn't need a disc for any of them

I assume a netbook will be the same, it's just a small laptop

[Flibbertyjibbet]

Thanks I feel a bit more confident now to start shopping....!

[RustyBear]

The words you would be looking for are 'optical drive' but I don't think any of the really small net books such as the Samsung NC10 or the Eeee have one.

Like purepurple I'm with Orange, and I found I did have to use the disc to put computers on the network - I've added 7 at various times including DD's boyfriend's Mac and they all needed the disc. So when I got an iPhone I was expecting problems, but to my surprise it was relatively easy.

I've been looking at netbooks recently for the school I work at & though we've decided on the Fizzbook for the children, for an adult I really like the Samsung NC 10, which a friend has.

[DegreesMinutesSecondsIsMale]

My Eee worked fine with a BT Home hub - it just needed the Password for the internet box.

It also works fine with any other network I've had legitimate access to :-)

[Flibbertyjibbet]

Thanks. Its not an Eee I'm looking at but I think all the netbooks probably have the same way of connecting your wireless.

Can anyone else tell me, when they say numbers like 1gb and 500mb, do higher numbers indicate a faster pc ie when I'm surfing, or is it just how much space you have for storing things (just thinking of temporary storage of photos to send to Truprint or pics of things to list on ebay).

[Aeschylus]

processor and memory are key, 500mb is very small, surfing speed is all about your excange speed, PC has nothing to do with it

[Flibbertyjibbet]

Sorry I'm such a technophobe I don't understand that last post

If processor and memory are key, do they relate to the speed of the surfing, or are you saying that the speed of surfing relates to the broadband provided?

[Tortoise]

I have the Samsung NC10 and all i needed to do was put in the code off the bottom of the wireless router.(Well, my brother did lol!)
Was very easy to set up.

[RustyBear]

There's two things to think about here - the speed that the information gets to you from the internet, which is down to the speed of your connection, and the speed with which your computer processes that information, which is affected both by the speed and type of the computer's processor and the size of its RAM (Random Access Memory) which is the memory used by the computer to run programs, (as opposed to the hard drive which is for storage)

As an example of these numbers, my friend's Samsung netbook I mentioned above has a 1.6 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM & a 160 GB hard drive, which is fairly typical, though you can also get netbooks which have Flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive - the same kind of memory as is used in camera cards - it has no moving parts so it's much more robust & less likely to go wrong, but it's much more expensive, so netbooks with Flash drives have much less space - maybe 16-20 Gb or even less.

[Flibbertyjibbet]

Thanks I'll check the specs of the ones I'm looking at against that.
Its sooo confusing!