Netbooks

I bought my first netbook about a month ago - an MSI Wind U100, featuring a 10-inch screen (1024x600) and utilising a 1.6 GHz "Atom" processor. It is extremely light -- the laptop with the battery in it weighs about a kilo.

For A$680 it also came with a 120 GB HD (at the time of ordering it was spec'd with an 80 GB, so bonus...), 1 GB RAM, 802.11g, and a 6-cell battery (good for 4-5 hours). It has 3 external USB ports and an ethernet port. The key thing it doesn't come with: a CD or DVD drive. But that's fine.

I also bought a few 3rd party add-ons -- another 1 GB RAM, replaced the Wireless G mini PCI-E card with a Wireless N, and replaced the internal disk with a 2.5-inch 500 GB SATA (5400 rpm). This brought the total spend up to around (just below) A$1000. In terms of modifying/installing the 3rd party hardware? Piece of cake.

A couple of weekends ago I configured it as a hackintosh (10.5.4). I am very impressed with the results -- the laptop is quite snappy even with I/O and CPU intensive tasks such as running a Windows XP instance in VMware or playing video.

The only HW not working is the headphone jacks and the internal microphone (easily remedied with a USB headset, which I use when I voice-skype anyways).

While I'll keep my MacBook Pro for everyday work, the netbook should be the perfect travel companion for my upcoming trips to Hong Kong and the Czech Republic. Not only is it compact and light, but it's so inexpensive that if it came to the crunch I wouldn't be too worried about replacing it if it got flogged.

For A$1000, I think the spec is unbelievably good.