As anyone with the slightest interest in computing will tell you, the netbooks are the hottest class of PC out there right now. These are the ~$400 9 - 10" laptops with an Intel Atom processor and initially were being offered with either Linux or Windows XP Home. Now they mostly seem to be XP Home and the better ones all have 10" screens, 1 GB RAM, and 160 GB hard drives.
A client wanted one recently and they wanted wireless WAN connectivity with an Express slot so that left pretty much the Lenovo S10 as the primary model to select. I added 1 GB stick so it has a total of 1.5 GB RAM, the 160 GB 5400 rpm hard drive, and I cleansed it of the bloatware and trial software. Admittedly though, the trialware was nowhere as bad as the $500 Windows desktops, at least it not yet, as more of these machines get out there and the subsidies start poring in, we'll see how that goes...
On two different netbooks, one an Acer Aspire One (D150) and another Lenovo S10, I installed Office, Google Pack, and the other cadre of typical software for a standard Windows install. Both ran the software fine and have what I would call perfectly acceptable performance. Neither are 'fast' but they're more than capable of being lightweight, highly portable computers. They're cute, if not attractive, and highly functional, though you won't be typing 60wpm with 0 errors.
As a work/business computer, I'd be hesitant to recommending them for much more than casual e-mail/web/basic Office duty. My reasons for that are the perceived disposability of them (heck, they're less than $400, is it *really* a big deal if one gets lost?); the fact that most come with XP Home instead of Pro; and they're easy targets for thieves.
I like the netbooks a lot, one will probably end up in my house as a kick-around surfing device, at least until I decide to figure out how to load a version of Mac OS X that doesn't die with each Mac update!
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