I’ve I was having lunch with another SQL Geek and we were talking about netbooks and how practical they are. Is it worth getting one if you have a laptop, especially if you have to pay for it yourself. It’s only $300-400, but that’s not an insignificant amount of money. And if I was going to spend that much on equipment for my career, I think I’d be tempted to get one of the 32” LCDs that I saw at Wal-Mart.

I’m writing this post using LiveWriter on my HP Mini netbook and at the same time I have Powerpoint 2007, SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition and SSMS running. Starting these four things up was a little slow, but once they’re going, the performance isn’t bad.

I can switch between SSMS and Powerpoint, adding code to the demo, running it, and going back to the presentation without too much delay. In fact, the biggest slowdown to my working with the netbook on the presentation is the small screen size. It hampers my ability to easily work on things as I can only see a (relatively) few lines of code at a time.

The true test will be during a presentation when I am running code live, but for now this appears to be working fairly well. I’m not sure I’d recommend this if you do a lot of demos, compile code, etc. as those things can be slow on a full powered laptop. If you are running light queries, across dozens of rows to just show how something works, however, I think this might be fine.

Even the keyboard doesn’t seem to slow me down too much.

It’s certainly not close to a fulltime computer, but for the traveling tech professional that is presenting, I think the netbook will do a decent job in many cases. As with anything, you’ll need to test it for your work.