Top 5 Essential Netbook Accessories

Now that I have a new netbook I decided to post a list of must have accessories to go with it. These are the small but essential items you need to go with your new netbook purchase.

1. Pouch/ Sleeve

This is a thin and lightweight sleeve which is essential for when you want to just chuck your netbook in a rucksack and go. It will protect it from knocks and bumps. They come in a range of colours so you can match your outfit or netbook. The pictured sleeve is manufactured by Belkin. It is made of tough neoprene

which should be able to withstand wear and tear.

2. External Hard Drive

As most netbooks come with very small built in hard drives you will most likely need an external one to supplement your storage needs. They range in capacity from around 80Gb to 500Gb. The best option is a slim portable one however you can get larger external drives up to 1Tb of storage. The pictured model is an iomega model.

3. Wireless Mouse

As I found out with my netbook purchase, alot of smaller laptops have sub-par trackpads. This

means the best option is to purchase a mouse. To reduce cable clutter around your laptop I suggest getting a wireless mouse. There are two main types of wireless mouse; bluetooth and ones with a seperate usb adapter. I would reccomend a blutooth one

such as the pictured logitech one as it saves using a USB port.

4. USB Thumb Drive

As well as an external hard drive you will probably need a small, portable means of storage for transferring documents between computers and backing up files temporarily. This is where a USB thumb drive comes in handy. You can simple plug it in save a document then pop it in a port on another computer and copy across for nearly instantaneous transfers. You can also use it to store small "portable apps" which can then be used on any computer you are using.

5. External Optical Drive

While netbooks do not have an internal optical drive in oder to keep their size and weight down, sometimes you will need to use an optical drive to watch a film, save data or copy music or even install an operating system. This means you will inevitably need an external optical drive. Now you can get a very thin lightweight drive powered from one USB port which is perfect for your little netbook.