What goes up must come down, and lately what's coming down are netbooks, as more and more articles talk about the compact computers disappointing customers. However, we can't blame netbooks for that. We can only blame vendors who overhype and customers who underbuy. Before you buy a smaller, cheaper and less powerful netbook, determine if you need a notebook instead. If so, you can spend about the same money and get more power, albeit in a larger package.

Let's decide what a “netbook” really is. Most definitions focus on the processor, an Intel Atom rather than some flavor of Celeron, Mobile Pentium, Dual Core or one of AMD's models. Screen sizes are small, either 8.9 or 10 diagonal inches, rather than 13 inches like the smallest notebooks and MacBooks. We'll leave Apple out of this discussion since it makes excellent small notebooks but refuses to jump into the netbook market.

Netbooks don't have any type of CD or DVD drives. Even the least expensive notebooks do, however, so be careful if you really need a CD or DVD for work. Or, like many people on airplanes today, to watch a movie.

Operating systems run the gamut from Microsoft to Microsoft, with the company resurrecting XP yet again to steal the netbook market away from the Linux operating system experiments on the very first netbooks. While notebooks almost always have Vista, netbooks often ship with XP. Many believe that's a prime reason for their appeal, but that's an argument for another time.

Price used to be an issue, but no longer. Low end notebooks from all major vendors are available for less than $500, and netbooks from those same vendors can cost $500 and sometimes more. Just be aware a high end netbook at $500 does different jobs than a low end notebook at about the same price.

Many people complain about the small keyboards, but the 2140 Mini-Notebook HP lent me for the lab here has a pretty good keyboard. I'm comparing this against what could have been a netbook eight years ago, an HP OmniBook 500 I bought used. It has a Pentium III processor (remember those?) with 256MB of RAM and a 10GB hard disk running Windows 2000. Built for portability, the OmniBook doesn't have a CD drive built in.

While the 2140 keyboard is 10 inches across, the OmniBook keyboard is 10.25 inches. Not much difference. Keyboard depth is four inches on both. The new system has the flush, aluminum looking modern keys, but the older OmniBook has more traditional keys with some space between the key caps. There's little real difference between the two when typing.