The Asus is your best bet. If you want cheap, Dell has the mini-9.
The dell mini9 is supposedly going to be selling for $300 on black friday.
Just got an Acer Aspire One yesterday, and haven’t got enough experience with it to make a firm recommendation. $349 shipped from Newegg, with WinXP, 1gb RAM, 120gb HD.
IMO this is an unbeatable deal for the specs you get (pay attention: real hdd, 1gb ram, real OS, decent keyboard and screen). We friggin’ love our Aspire One!
No major weaknesses on the Aspire One other than mediocre battery which is fairly typical for the non-mongo-battery models.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my netbook absolutely must have at least a 6-cell battery and solid state disk. I do on-site tech work so I need the extra run time and being able to toss it around and not worry too much about the disk would be a big plus.
Can’t touch-type on the Eee 1000? Are you Gorilla Grodd or something? :)
Seriously, I have big hands, and I have zero issues touch-typing at full speed on the Eee 1000, MSI Wind, or the HPs. It’s just the smaller ones (Eee 900, Lenovo S10, Acer Aspire One, etc.) that I have to really concentrate on to touch-type.
And the dinky-ass keyboard. :)
All smallish notebooks have that problem. I certainly don’t love the Aspire One’s keyboard, but it hasn’t been horrible.
Been using the Acer One for a while now, and I like it a lot. The old cranky Toshiba has been replaced for good.
Retrogaming requires a lot of tweaking and no-cd patches. For example, Evil Genius won’t start until you’ve manually set the (admittedly odd) 1024x600 screen res in the config file. Hexen 2 runs better in 2D mode than 3D. Startopia refuses to run without an optical drive, no matter how it’s patched.
being able to toss it around and not worry too much about the disk
Notebook hard drives are quite rugged.
Beware SSDs for netbooks – the only small, slow cheap kind that work in netbooks offer:
- no power savings
- MUCH worse performance. Like bad. I mean really bad. USB memory stick bad.
- puny amounts of storage (4gb, 8gb, 16gb)
Yes, they are technically “more rugged” but unless you literally throw your netbook, I seriously doubt you will have an issue with a standard laptop HDD. They’re built much tougher than desktop 3.5" drives.
The only good SSDs are the latest and greatest cutting edge $600+ ones. Everything else is kinda crap. This might change over the next few years, but not very rapidly.
Holy cow, the Aspire One comes in ZUNE BROWN!
WANT.
(note that on newegg the $379+ Aspire One models appear to have the larger 6 cell battery…)
Get the Acer Aspire 1 from Costco, 90 day return policy and 3 year warrantee for the same price as Newegg.
But when they’re operating, they still need a reasonably stable environment. When I move my laptop around, the shock detector thing invariably pauses the hard drive. Not the end of the world, but it’d be neat to have something with no spinny parts where that wasn’t an issue.
It’ll be nice when it does. I put an X-25M in my Eee 1000H and it’s sweet. Same size as the original drive, but loads things (and hibernates/resumes) lickety-split.
Yeah, it costs as much as the Eee itself, but the combo’s still hella cheaper than a MacBook air or Thinkpad with SSD. :)
I really don’t recommend the Wind. The touch pad is seriously lacking.
Yeah, the original Winds (which I have) had a great touchpad. Apparently they changed manufacturers, and the new one’s okay if you just use it as a pointer mover, but stinks if you want to do advanced touchpady gesture thingies.
Yeah and just the fact that it doesn’t have the scroll on the side. Yeah…
The touchpad is the one thing I really dislike about the aspire 1. I’m itching to try windows 7 on it too but I’m not a pirate bay kinds guy…
Not as great a bargain as it looks. For $100 more you can get double the battery life, double the RAM, a 160GB HD and XP.
I just ordered the Aspire One with the big fat battery from Amazon on a discount. I’m excited, I’ve never owned a lappy.