Netbook Price / Performance

[daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

The other day I got the wild idea that my life might be more complete if I 
had a netbook.  The "justification" was that it would be easier to take on 
vacation and times when I didn't want to lug my laptop around.  I got this 
wild idea when I was strolling through Wal-Mart and passed their 
electronics department and saw a couple of Acer netbooks on display.  (I'm 
not in the habit of purchasing new computers at Wal-Mart.  I tend to shop 
for those online at Newegg.com, Dell, etc.)  It doesn't need to do a lot. 
I mostly want it for wi-fi Internet access and a place to temporarily dump 
photos from my digital camera.  There are times when it would be nice to 
stream videos or play an .mpg file that I've DVRed.  If it got lost, 
damaged, or stolen it wouldn't have been as costly as if it were my 
laptop.

The vast majority of ones that I've see on Newegg have the Atom N450 
processor.  There are a handfull of Atom N270 and Atom N280 processors 
with an occasional Celeron.  I'm not familiar with how the Atom performs 
compared with various Pentium processors.  Can I load up most software and 
expect it have slower but decent performance or would I be getting my 
hopes up?  It would be nice to keep the price below $300 but I don't want 
buy something cheap but unusable.  I imagine that battery life might be 
more of a consideration than on a laptop.

Any thoughts or recommendations of features or manufacturers?


Dave Parnin