Best Software for Netbooks

June 23, 2009 By Nick Mokey

Multimedia and Graphic Design

GIMP 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.

Window Movie Maker 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.

Page 5 of 5

<1 2 3 45

Showing 11 comments

Netbookfiles.com at 3:06am 7th May 2010 no one mentioned about my netbook software site guys!

Please do check it out : http://www.netbookfiles.com

We have put a lot of man-hours into this.
Seriously at 9:58am 11th February 2010 Seriously...a statement like that... you should not be allowed to own a computer.
yoseff at 7:05pm 28th January 2010 definetley chrome over firefox. mozilla offers all of the plugs for html junkies and rss, but on a notebook, chrome is simply... simple.
woodyman11 at 7:45am 27th January 2010 i am not joking you guys these games are fine but why dont you download the project64k emulator and then you can play great games like zelda, goldeneye and mariokart etc.... and ohh thats right they are free too enjooooooooy!!!!!1
woodyman11 at 7:45am 27th January 2010 i am not joking you guys these games are fine but why dont you download the project64k emulator and then you can play great games like zelda, goldeneye and mariokart etc.... and ohh thats right they are free too enjoooooooooooy!!!!!1
Ian Bell at 8:57am 7th December 2009 Are you kidding me? Of course it is.
popo at 1:33am 7th December 2009 openoffice is not lighter than office 2007.
dang at 1:31am 25th November 2009 VLC player is pretty awesome
chris at 1:28am 25th November 2009 My favorite is the VCL player http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html
Chris at 1:26am 25th November 2009 I'd like to add IRFAN as a phantastic, lean grafic viewer with the essential functions of cropping, resizing, adjusting pictures etc. http://www.irfanview.com/

Also, using Firefox with the plugins Fireshot for screenshots, cooliris and coolpreviews really helps.
czechod at 11:12am 20th November 2009 What's the best (free) software to play movies on a netbook? I installed Nero (8) but can't get any audio... ready to try something else. Suggestions?