San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

tried both EEE and Aspire One.

Aspire One wins hands down. The boot time is faster, the look is slicker, the $300 price tag is excellent. and the wife love the pink.

I have the Asus EEE PC 1000H. If you have large hands the extra width of the 10" netbooks is nice. The resolution is the same between the 9" and 10" displays.

I can't complain much about the performance. It handles the usual surfing, word processing, and mulitmedia apps just fine. In fact, my Dell desktop took a dump a couple of days ago. I used the EEE PC as a replacement just fine. I connected the VGA port to my 20" LCD. All I had to do was select the correct resolution. Even dual display using the netbooks LCD works. I even had OS X running on it for awhile.

The 9" will be lighter and easier to carry on your travels. The Aspire One is feather light but, felt "cheap" to the touch. If you're into modding at all, the Apsire is less mod friendly.

The MSI Wind seems to be the mod leader.

thanks, definitely not into modding. I just want something to carry around while travelling that will let me surf the web and watch some video when I am bored at the airport, maybe view a word or excel doc here and there. Since I carry other stuff in my backpack like my DSLR and stuff I don't want anything that will be a pain to lug around.

My question is this... is the 10" that much bigger or heavier than a 9" that the extra weight is noticable? I have checked some of these models in the store but unfortunately I could not get a sense of the weight as they had removed the batteries and they were running off the adapter.

i went for the asus 1005ha in the end due to its 8 hour battery life. it costs about $320 on amazon

Acer. But I'm biased :)

My wife and I have matching ASUS 900A ($299.00 at Best Buy last fall) netbooks, and they work quite well. We run Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid; no idea if Windows does well on these machines.

If you get one of these with 1GB of RAM, spend $32.00 (shipped) on a 2GB upgrade from crucial.com It makes a big difference if you can minimize or eliminate disk swapping since the MLC Flash drives in these things are slow.

Speaking of flash drives, I replaced the tiny 4GB unit in mine with a 64GB MLC drive. ($115.00 at the time, but prices fluctuate all over the place).

They're good little machines. My wife prefers her work-supplied MacBook, but that's mainly a screen size issue. I use mine almost exclusively, and we also have a late model 20" iMac and an older 12" G4 iBook to choose from.

I laugh when I see reviews that say netbooks are only good for light surfing, email, etc. I use mine for everything but video editing and conversion, and I'm a programmer/tech guy. If I have to type a lot of stuff, I use an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, though--these little chicklet keys can slow you down.

Me too. Biased because I have and use acers. Not because I'm Taiwanese (I'm not).

Asus is taiwanese too :) But my bias for Acer is because I have a Asus netbook from earlier times, and those things are built kinda flimsy.

Get the Samsung. Samsung makes a better laptop then Asus or Acer.

Acer is a really really cheap brand and they cut corners on components.

I would consider an Asus but only if it were significantly cheaper

Test-drive the netbooks (type, poke, close, open) and I think you will figure out quickly what you like...keyboard size is also an issue.

Have you upgraded to the latest Ubuntu 9.04? The boot up time is greatly improved and it feels a bit more snappier. I have a 6 years old Thinkpad running Ubuntu 9.04 and it feels faster than my latest and greatest desktop running Vista. When I just want to do quick web browsing and e-mail, I reach for my Thinkpad vs the PC.

Hi,

I have a msi u100.

The only question I can answer is on the size side since not the brand you are considering.

I LOVE the small size, it is so easy to handle. .

I like my Netbook over a standard PC because it doesn't fry me when I have it in my lap.

The battery, as usual never lasts as long as they say but they last much longer than a standard PC. Mine is supposed to last 6 hours but lasts 2 and a half hours.

It is unbelievably portable.

Everyone I talk to about it says the same thing. "I don't think I would like it because the screen would be too small". NOT TRUE.

For extreme portability I went with the Lenovo X Series as my only computer.