Netbooks

Last year a craze started of the super tiny and super cheap laptops, commonly referred to as netbooks.

Laptops of this style have been around since the days of Windows 3.1, though they were called Sub-notebooks back then. I have one from about 1994.

Anyways, last November I jumped on the netbook bandwagon with an Acer Aspire One. I have to say that I am very pleased with it. The one I have has an 8.9" screen, 120GB Hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and a 3-cell battery. This makes it one of the earlier ones put out by Acer, there are 10.2" and 11.6" screen versions out now. My biggest gripe about the hardware is rather minor, the rubber feet on the bottom all came off, however this was easily remedied by replacing them with felt. The only other issue I can think of is that the screen and lid are both major fingerprint magnets.

Mine shipped with Windows XP Home Edition on it. Windows XP's interface, however isn't all that well suited for use on such a small resolution display, so I have a dual-boot set up with Ubuntu Netbook Remix (a type of Linux specialized for use with small netbook screens).

I have seen mixed opinions on the future of netbooks, the craze for them has diminished a lot the past few months, however, I think they are here to stay. A new one coming out in October alonside the release of Microsoft Windows 7 is the Acer Ferrari One, a premium Netbook. It will feature AMD's new VISION platform with a low-power Athlon X2 at 1.2GHz, and Integrated low-power ATI graphics. I think the start price for the basic one will be around $630 USD, so it is definitely a premium computer (The 10.2" Acer Aspire Ones retail for around $300), however the price isn't as outrageous as some other brands.