While the economy has been bad consumers have still been buying and replacing computers. Rather than buying the expensive notebooks that they might have went for in years past, many consumers looked to cheap netbooks for computers.

Research firm StrategyAnalytics reports that netbook shipments in 2009 boomed with a total of 30.2 million units shipped globally. That number is a 79% growth compared to the previous year’s netbook shipments.

Key markets for netbook shipments for the year were North America and Europe. The firm expects growth to continue to be big for netbooks in 2010. The top netbook vendors in 2009 were Acer, Asus, HP, and Dell.

StrategyAnalytics