Netbook: taking the plunge.....

In December of 2008 the display on my trusty Gateway laptop broke. So I connected it to an external monitor and a TV for a while, but then I had scheduled roadtrips and presentations coming up. My Gateway would no longer fit the bill and I didn't particularly like lugging a laptop around anyway. I had tried working off my phone for several years (just not there yet), so I thought I would try a netbook. I choose the Acer Aspire (1.6 ghz Atom processor, 1 gb ram, 160 gb hard drive, svga external display, 3 usb slots, ethernet rj-45, wireless b/g, sd memory card slot, microphone/heaphone jacks, built in camera, and ms windows xp home edition). Right price, right functionality....

I initially thought the keyboard was a little small, but after a few days I was comfortable with it. I loaded up the Aspire with my favorite Opensource applications (AVG free anti-virus/anti-spyware, ZoneAlarm firewall, Scan2Pdf, PDF995, CamStudio, Audacity, VNC, Skype, Spybot S&D, ZipGenious and Secobackup) and I use Google's Gmail, Calendar, Docs that live in the cloud.

Am I using the netbook as my main computer, yes, and it is working very well.

I would recommend it for any business traveler (battery life is about 3 hours) and definitely for students. At a price of $329.99, the Acer Aspire netbook is a very good value. You can purchase a netbook from Amazon (your favorite electronics website) or your local computer store (if they are still in business)......