Netbooks for accountants

Netbooks may be popular with personal users looking for a way to surf the web on the go. But these tiny machines are also fairly capable workhorses for people whose jobs often require travel. They’re light weight and tiny, which means they don’t take up much space in a bag, but they’re powerful enough to perform many basic computing tasks.

As I’ve mentioned before, I regularly use netbooks to edit and upload audio for radio news reports. And photographer Rob Galbraith says his Dell Inspiron Mini 9 helps him import and transmit images in the field. But photographers and radio producers aren’t the only professionals who might find netbooks usefull for work. You know who else likes them? Accountants.

Accounting Web has a surprisingly interesting article helping accountants pick the best laptop. And two netbooks mde the list, the Asus Eee PC S101 and the Samsung NC10. Both have 10 inch displays and nice roomy keyboards and hard drives. The Samsung NC10 also gets up to 7 hours of battery life. While the Eee PC 1000H actually gets better battery life and costs less than the Eee PC S101, the S101 is prettier.

One thing to keep in mind is that accountants type a lot of numbers, which means the best keyboards for accounting have a built in numeric keypad. And that’s something you’ll never find on a netbook (or most full sized laptops for that matter), because it just takes up too much space. Fortunately, plenty of companies offer USB numeric keypads.