I'll bite.

Which one is it?

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Any of the 10 or 11 series Eee PCs

I have a samsung nc10. It has a hard drive disc rather than SSD but battery life is very good. With wireless on you can get 6 hours; turn it off and you can get even more.

I bought one of these last year in the USA - Dell Mini 9 - it cost $299 including Windows XP installed:



As others have recommended, it has an SSD drive (rather than spinning hard disk) therefore no moving parts to potentially get damaged. It comes with 8GB installed but you can expand that with the SD slot on the side - ideally you can back up your photos/music etc to additional SD cards as required - same goes for Garmin mapsource maps etc.

The main thing that appealed to me was the size of this machine - it is about half the size of my Macbook, and even fits in my Camelbak Blowfish bag no problem - yet the keyboard is still big enough to type on (which is fundamental compared to blackberry/iphone type devices), and it also comes with Dell's own version of Skype for video/audio calling over the internet, and as it runs Windows, you can even install Skype itself of course... it also seems very well screwed together for a 'budget' machine - moreso than the EEEPCs I compared it to at the time.

I can appreciate Sirakor's concern about spending too much time nerding online rather than experiencing your surroundings... but conversely there are times where having you own (instant) access to Google etc could prove invaluable, especially if traveling alone? - It certainly made my last trip easier on a number of occasions. I'd say as long as you have the discipline to use the on/off switch, just treat it as another tool in your arsenal?

J xxx

1005HA, 160gb hard-drive, so space for everything, just the same as yours.

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Right, so no arguing about the whole hard disk vs. SSD issue

Nice machine by the way!

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I just picked up the 1000HE and have mapsource, smellybikers maps as well as tracks 4 africa already loaded. Also have a 500GB portable hard drive for all the files. I love this little guy.

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What about an Apple ITouch.

iPod touch - Apple Store (U.S.)

There's no doubt that typing would be a pain. But you could store and read pdf files. Check and respond to email. Surf the internet. Carry ebooks to read and use it to play games/music. And it fits in your pocket. I was told you can also use Skype for audio calling over the internet with one.

daryl

Funny you mention the itouch/iphone - nearly everyone on the Heroes-Legend rally had one of these and was beavering away on it night after night!

By all accounts it is a fantastic device, other than the limited typing options as you suggest... so fine for everything except updating blog pages perhaps?

The word on the street is that Apple will enter the 'netbook' market with a gadget that uses similar architecture to the iphone (rather than a full-on OSX Macbook), but with a proper keyboard and decent sized screen - now that is going to be worth waiting for!

xxx

I just got my Itouch. Typing is indeed a pain. I agree that using it to update a blog would be painful if down right impossible. But I can see the advantage of having both. I have traveled myself for work where I was forced to carry a laptop. I hated it. I would only use it when I was out of sight from the rest of the world. I didn't want to advertise that I was carrying one.

Daryl

Typed with an Apple Itouch.

I guess I need to eat some crow here. My EEEPC went belly-up after a year of hard use (motorcycling on and off road, backpacking when not motorcycling). First it started corrupting files, rendering parts unreadable; then it started doing weird things while I was backing stuff up (like copying folders but leaving out most of the contents, so that I thought stuff had been fully backed up when in fact it had not). Finally, some of the keys stopped recording keystrokes: no letter "i" or "enter" key, for example.

I was in Panama, far from the nearest known repair shop or restore CD, so I shipped it home and bought a Windows Aspire One, one of the few English language/American keyboard netbooks I could find. It's more full-featured, but Windows is a pain in the butt, and setting it up for basic computing tasks is ridiculously awkward for this confirmed Mac/Linux user. It's also much larger, which makes for easier keyboarding and more screen acreage, but it's correspondingly harder to pack. And I've now got all sorts of added nonsense to deal with, like anti-virus, purchasing MS Word when my trial runs out, etc. etc. etc.

So....I'm no longer quite so gleeful about the EEEPC with its flash drive. It was great while it lasted, but a year is a bit scant for a lifespan, and it cost me a lot of irritation (and a fair bit of money) when it went down. Not to say, of course, that the Aspire One will necessarily do any better.
Hope this helps.

Mark

A Linux guy buying MS Word?! Why not just download OpenOffice for free?

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Why don't you just put Linux on that Laptop as well? You know it doesn't have to be preinstalled, do you?

Seriously it's supposed to work and you can always get back to windows if you have to. If you don't have the bandwith, the Ubuntu guys used to send of CDs (yes, pressed cds) for free. Might be something to check out...

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Yeh, yeh, yeh. I can do lots of stuff....but I'm in Colombia sitting downstream from a fan sweating buckets, not somewhere nice and comfy and relaxed. Everything has a learning curve, and I've a half-dozen more urgent issues with my bike, a couple of credit card issuers and other banks to get in touch with, to drink......

Seriously, thanks for the suggestions but I'm more in a putting-out-brushfires mode at the moment. Downloading another OS, while eminently sensible (and also quite possible here in Cali), just gives me more disconnected information to track. Adding a parallel word processing capability might complicate life as well--for whatever reason, when my EEEPC started acting funny one of the first signs was that Open Office files I'd saved as .doc files started becoming unreadable on Windows machines. I don't know why, and I don't want to know why. But I do know that the more variables and the more steps in a complex process, the more there is to foul up, whether my fault of Mister Gates'.

And the thought of having a CD sent to me somewhere in South America has comedy value, but probably wouldn't work very well here on the ground. But who know?

I'm just miffed about the whole issue, and the fact that Macs and my one Linux netbook were up and running so effortlessly compared to this one doesn't help settle my nerves.

Safe journeys!

Mark

FWIW, I've used OpenOffice and Word on the same machines for ages, and have saved documents back and forth many hundreds of times. Never a problem other than minor and inevitable formatting glitches. A new laptop should handle both no sweat.

I do prefer working in Word but hey -- OpenOffice is free. Good luck with all the brush fires ~~

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