Help me, hivemind!

[sabotabby]

A bunch of you have netbooks. What do you recommend? I want to get one for my eventual travels: Light, durable, and as powerful as possible within those constraints.

Comments

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

I have a MSI Wind, model U123, and I'm quite happy with it. It's not totally top-of-the-line or anything, but thus far it's done everything I want it to quite nicely, the battery life is good, it's nice and compact, and seems just generally well-behaved.

Also, not sure if this is relevant to your needs, but installing Ubuntu Linux (specifically the Netbook Remix of it) on it was totally easy, once I figured out the trick of how to (a) make a bootable USB drive from the Windows side (it came with Windows XP), and (b) convince it to actually boot from said drive (which came down to timing). Ever since then, all has been good. I kept the original Windows install on a small partition, mainly for testing web sites in IE, but I use Ubuntu as my primary OS on the netbook.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

I do not recommend MSI Wind as a brand (I own a U100). The keyboard design is awkward and the preinstalled drivers often have bizarre incompatibilities... not designed really for an optimal end-user experience. And the warranty support is quite badly managed. I had to pay my own way to ship my netbook to Markham for battery repair, and then when they returned it the mouse key was broken and had to be reshipped a second time.

I'm not a giant Dell fan but at least with them you know what you're getting :) Acer is mentioned here too and they're pretty solid. And Asus pretty much pioneered this form factor before the other manufacturers got into it.

Check out pricecanada.com if you have any particular model in mind and want to compare prices. All the vendors on that site are Canadian or priced in Canadian dollars.