With limited hardware resources, netbooks are designed to do lightweight tasks like surfing the internet and word processing. However, many ‘big name’ programs havn’t been designed with netbooks in mind. Here we have a list of useful lightweight programs that will work brilliantly with your netbook.

OpenOffice

One of the best free downloads you can get is this suite of open-source productivity applications. OpenOffice includes lightweight but robust applications that compete with the expensive Microsoft Office alternatives: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentations), Base (database), Draw (diagram creator) and Math (editor for math formulas). Downloads are available for both Windows and Linux.

Google Chrome

Firefox is often favoured for surfing the net on high-end computers, but for netbooks, Google’s open source Chrome browser is an extremely lightweight browser that is winning lots of speed competitions. It’s only available for Windows at the moment, but will be out in a Linux version early next year.

VLC Media Player

Depending what hardware resources you have on your netbook and the media player you currently use, you may occasionally run into problems running video and audio content. VLC Media Player is a lightweight, free and open source media player that will work on either a Windows or Linux netbook. It supports nearly every popular file format and is specifically designed for portability.

RocketDock

RocketDock is an animated application launcher which is similar to the one used on Mac OSX. It’s much faster and more flexible than the object docks on most netbooks and has an easy drag-and-drop interface. Click here to see a video.

TinyResMeter

TinyResMeter is a lightweight application for tracking system resources in use. Netbooks, of course, often have stripped down hardware resources, so this is a good way to get on-the-fly information on memory usage, CPU usage and much more.

KDE

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project is a very good choice for Linux-based netbooks. It includes slick desktop applications, including the Kontact personal information manager, Dragon Player for multimedia applications, and the Konqueror web browser.

PortableApps

For Windows-based netbooks, this is a great collection of pre-selected free and primarily open source applications that you can stick on a netbook — or even a USB drive — in one quick download. It includes the portable editions of ClamWin (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Gaim (instant messaging), OpenOffice (office suite), Sudoku (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird (email client), among other applications. You can cherry-pick the applications you want, or run the whole suite in under 512MB.

Online Hosted Apps.

One of the fundamental concepts behind netbooks is that you can use them with applications that are hosted online. If you don’t already use these, there are excellent, free choices from Zoho and Google Apps. Ulteo gives you 1GB of free online storage, and access to all of the OpenOffice productivity apps online.

Finally, don’t forget that USB flash drives can be an excellent adjunct to your netbook. You can get lots of capacity for very little money, and one simple download such as the PortableApps download above can put countless free applications in your pocket for use on your netbook whenever you want.

With thanks to: giga OM

If you want to increase your screen space for surfing the web, we have a few simple tips that will help you to see more of the web in your internet browser.

1. Toolbar Shrinking

Consider an add-on that shrinks the amount of space a program’s toolbar takes up. Firefox, for example, has at least two toolbar-squishing add-ons available: Littlefox (snipurl.com/hkshp) and Classic Compact (snipurl.com/hksj5). Both will reduce the size of your toolbar.

2. Full Screen Mode

If you find that videos and images are too big for the browser window. This one is easily dealt with by pressing the F11 button on your keyboard which takes your browser into full screen mode – your toolbar and taskbar will be hidden. Just hit F11 – Try it now!

3. Zoom Out

It’s relatively uncommon to find a website that’s optimised for a screen resolution wider than 1024 pixels, but when it happens it can make life a real pain. Not only do you have to scroll horizontally to see the whole page, but that extra scroll bar takes up another chunk of valuable vertical screen real estate. Fortunately, Firefox’s Zoom function allows you to deal with sites like this quickly and painlessly.

Hitting Control and – (minus key) decreases the size of the page, while Control and + (plus key) increases it. Control and 0 (zero key) resets to the original size. By default, the behavior will scale all elements of the page, and doesn’t seem to break any layouts, so it’s just like zooming in or out while viewing a digital photograph.