Acer Review, Asus Review – Netbook 10

Our ratings system may be modified to suit your specific needs. Through our flexible netbook ratings system, you can focus only on the factors that actually matter to you.

Simple Use of Our Netbook Ratings System

Instead of using all 7 factors, you can choose the factors that you think are the most important and come up with an overall score that reflects your personal preferences. Let’s suppose that a netbook has the following scores:

• Price and value for money: 0.5 (or ½ star)
• Speed and performance: 1.0 (or 1 star)
• Screen: 0.5 (or ½ star)
• Keyboard and usability: 1.0 (or 1 star)
• Portability and battery life: 1.0 (or 1 star)
• Looks and design: 0.5 (or ½ star)
• Extensibility and connectivity: 1.0 (or 1 star)

As you can see, the netbook has an overall score of 5.5  stars, which is not a perfect score using our standard ratings system. However, let’s suppose that you actually care only for Speed and Performance, Keyboard and Usability, Portability and Battery Life, and Extensibility and Connectivity and do not care for the rest of the factors.

In this case, you can create your own index by summing up only the scores on these 4 factors you believe to be important.  After that, you can compare your prospective netbooks’ new overall scores as usual.  Under this new system, you can readily see that the netbook in the above example is actually perfect for your needs for it rates 1.0 in every one of your priority factors, and has a perfect score under your personalized netbook ratings system:

• Speed and performance: 1.0
• Keyboard and usability: 1.0
• Portability and battery life: 1.0
• Extensibility and connectivity: 1.0

Advanced Use of our Netbook Ratings System

You can also use our netbook ratings system in even more specialized ways. You can weight the individual scores so you can arrive at a final score that will reflect the relative importance that you assign to each of the 7 factors.

To do this, rank each of the 7 factors according to its importance in your netbook buying decision, give each of the factors a corresponding weighting coefficient, multiply the netbook’s score for each factor (0.0, 0.5 or 1.0) with that factor’s weighting coefficient, then add up the resulting weighted scores to get a new overall total.

The weighting coefficients are random numbers but they must reflect the relative importance of the factors.  In other words, the higher the coefficient for a factor, the more important that factor is.  Furthermore, if you give a factor a coefficient of 2 and another factor a coefficient of 1, that’s saying that you deem the first factor twice as important as the second factor.

To illustrate, let’s use the actual scores of our hypothetical netbook above:

• Price and value for money: 0.5 (or ½ star)
• Speed and performance: 1.0 (or 1 star)
• Screen: 0.5 (or ½ star)
• Keyboard and usability: 1.0 (or 1 star)
• Portability and battery life: 1.0 (or 1 star)
• Looks and design: 0.5 (or ½ star)
• Extensibility and connectivity: 1.0 (or 1 star)

First, let’s rank the factors from the most important to the least important. Let’s suppose, that this is the way you want them ordered:

1. Speed and performance: 1.0 (or 1 star)
2. Price and value for money: 0.5 (or ½ star)
3. Portability and battery life: 1.0 (or 1 star)
4. Extensibility and connectivity: 1.0 (or 1 star)
5. Keyboard and usability: 1.0 (or 1 star)
6. Screen: 0.5 (or ½ star)
7. Looks and design: 0.5 (or ½ star)

Second, let’s assign random but relative weighting coefficients to each factor (the coefficients are the rightmost numbers):

1. Speed and performance: 1.0 (or 1 star) —- 3.0
2. Price and value for money: 0.5 (or ½ star) —- 2.5
3. Portability and battery life: 1.0 (or 1 star) —- 2.0
4. Extensibility and connectivity: 1.0 (or 1 star) —- 2.0
5. Keyboard and usability: 1.0 (or 1 star) —- 1.0
6. Screen: 0.5 (or ½ star) —- 0.5
7. Looks and design: 0.5 (or ½ star) —- 0.0

Again, the coefficients must be relative. In the above example, you have assigned Speed and Performance a coefficient of 3.0; this means that a netbook’s Speed and Performance rating is thrice as important to you as its Keyboard and Usability rating, which you have given a coefficient of 1.0.

Your coefficients also show that you don’t assign any importance at all to the Looks and Design rating (0.0 coefficient) and only wants half of the actual score to reflect for the Screen factor (0.5 coefficient). You can also give two equally important factors the same weighting coefficients to reflect equal importance; the example above shows that you give the Portability and Battery Life factor and Extensibility and Connectivity factor equal weight.

Third, let’s multiply the actual scores with their weighting coefficients. The weighted scores for each of the factors will look like this:

1. Speed and performance: 1.0*3.0 = 3.0
2. Price and value for money: 0.5*2.5 = 1.25
3. Portability and battery life: 1.0*2.0 = 2.0
4. Extensibility and connectivity: 1.0*2.0 = 2.0
5. Keyboard and usability: 1.0*1.0 = 1.0
6. Screen: 0.5*0.5 = 0.25
7. Looks and design: 0.5*0.0 = 0.0

Fourth, let’s add the weighted scores:

Overall weighted score: 9.5

The overall weighted score is your new index or netbook rating score.

Important Note:

The weighted scores are truly meaningful only if you are comparing netbooks. Thus, you should come up with a shortlist of the netbooks you are considering, perform the weighted score calculation for each of the netbooks in your shortlist, then compare the weighted scores of your shortlisted netbooks. The netbook with the highest overall weighted score will be your obvious choice.

Through weighting therefore, there will be no dithering or indecision – the netbook with the highest overall weighted score will always be the perfect netbook for you; after all, you have modified the ratings system so it reflects your personal preferences.

So that’s it for now.  I hope this post makes our new standard netbook review format even clearer.

Related posts:

1. Netbook Ratings Criteria: How We Rate Netbooks
2. Netbook Review Format: A Guide
3. MSI Wind Netbooks – MSI Wind U100, U120 10″ Netbook
4. Touch Book Netbook + Tablet hybrid from Always Innovating
5. Acer Aspire One 8.9″ Netbooks – Acer Aspire 1 AOA150 8.9 inch

Filed under: Netbook Analysis