Best Software for Netbooks

Multimedia and Graphic Design

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Free

Photo editing experts will scoff at the thought of replacing Photoshop, but considering GIMP takes less than half RAM, your memory-strapped netbook will thank you. Just leave a few MB free for the user manual in a browser window, because you’ll need it.

Windows Movie Maker, Free

Yes, it’s old, and it comes with Windows, but we have to give Microsoft props for the relative simplicity and low system requirements from this video editing package. You won’t be pulling off green-screen compositing and 3D effects, but you can patch together a series of clips from a camcorder pretty easily.

Audacity Sound Editor, Free

You’ll again make some sacrifices to work with Audacity rather than more sophisticated software like Adobe Audition, but it will handle most of the simple editing you would want to do on a netbook, and do it more efficiently than the big guys.

Microsoft Image Resizer, Free

If you don’t need all the bells and whistles of GIMP and just want to shrink some 4MB photos before e-mailing them off to Grandma, it doesn’t get much simpler than this 521KB addition to Windows XP. After install, you can right click on image files and resize them to common sizes in seconds, with almost zero overhead.