What is the difference between a netbook and a laptop?

A laptop was built to be a portable replacement for the desktop computer. Having slightly less powerful hardware than a desktop computer, but capable of performing every need from business, email, websurfing, watching movies, and even gaming.

The netbook was designed for pure portability to answer the growing need of peoples internet activities such as facebook, myspace, youtube, and the like. Being much smaller and less powerful, they do not come with a cd or dvd drive, and are not capable of playing games like a desktop or laptop computer (graphic intensive 3D games). They can play java and flash based games and some non graphic intensive games, but gaming was not the purpose of their design.

Netbooks as Intel defines them have a screen smaller than 12-inches, they usually run Intel Atom processors, and can only have up to 2gb of ram. Netbooks are only those small laptops. They are designed to really only be good for surfing the web, checking email, etc.

Well technically a netbook is a laptop, and should instead be compared to a notebook.

Netbooks are by far less powerful, often have a single core processor, under 2gb ram, and are very small. Notebooks are far more powerful.

a netbook has a small screen small keyboard ,not for gaming and no dvd drive

a laptop/notebook you can get different sizes and better specs to play games and they have dvd drives

a netbook is smaller in size and in memory. also, a netbook has less battery duration, but it is MUCH cheaper. a laptop is bigger, has more memory and more battery, eventhough it is more expensive.

a notebook is essentially a much smaller laptop that is really only used for things like email, internet surfing, and very casual gaming, i.e. internet flash games. It's meant as a portable access terminal rather than a full fledged computer.

Generally, netbooks are very small laptops.

they almost always come without disc drives (as they are too small). In order from smallest to largest:

netbook

notebook

laptop

desktop.

NASA computers, lol.