I am about to spend the next few months running around the country and beyond on all forms of public transport - trains, planes automobiles and possible the occasional bike in London. I am using this a the perfect excuse to get myself a new laptop or netbook, as the family laptop os a 17" Toshiba monster and weighs half a tonne.

I don't have a great deal of knowledge when it comes to laptops / netbooks, I would really have liked to get an ultraportable but with a budget of £350 absolute max I don't think this is possible, so I would rather get a very good netbook than a poor laptop.

I would only be doing very basic Office tasks (mainly Word and Excel plus running the intermidable Powerpoint presentations) along with some light surfing etc.

Any suggestions would be most greatfully received.

This is what I use and I highly recommend it (cheapest I could find it):

http://www.technoworld.com/ACER_ASPIRE_ ... oduct.aspx

Here it is from other sellers if you want further options:

http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=acer ... gg&show=dd

Now, like the top link above, I'm running XP on it and we're more than happy , but I wouldn't fancy running My First Vista on an Atom chip, 2gb of RAM in some models or not

Speaking of some models, the variants for this netbook are legion, so just make sure of what you're getting if you decide it is the one for you (some have battery life even beyond the great standard one, bigger/smaller HDDs etc)

I bought my wife a samsung nc10 and it's fantastic. Not sure if they still sell them though.

Thanks to both of you, always good to get a users opinion rather than just a review.

That Acer looks great. I had not been looking at XP as an OS, blinded by Windows 7 despite only upgrading the home beast a couple of months ago. Definitely worth considering.

The Samsung looks great but it looks as if only Refurbished models or very expensive models are available.

If anyone else has any suggestions I am very glad to get them, but I will be trying to get some hands on with the Acer over the next couple of days.

Cheers.

Andythebatch

Personally I have an HP Mininote with a 1280x768 screen which I love. However, you can't get it any more and the battery life is barely 2 hours...

How important is battery life to you? Could you cope on a 1024x600 screen or do you need more?
That's the areas in which they vary the most significantly; otherwise they're usually ~ Atom processor 1GB RAM 160GB HDD.

PC Pro were recently impressed by the new Asus, which is cheap and lasts over 8 hours.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/alist/netbook

One thing I will say with regard to the windows issue is that on my wife's i run ubuntu netbook remix which is great and not too resource hungry. I only got the windows version for her as that's what she uses at work and she struggles enough with my mac as it is. Xp runs fine on a netbook so that's not an issue. If you can live with ubuntu, then happy days.

Also, ours was a refurb and i wouldn't discount any for that reason. I'll usually always choose a refurb if one's available.

It really is a case of balancing.

I could work with @ 1024 x 600, but would prefer something a little bigger, Excel spreadsheets have a tendency to grow. Battery life is more important, but I would be prepared to carry a second battery if it was required.

Looking at the models suggested so far I could get an Aspire and a second battery for well within my budget, which would seem to tick most of the boxes.

The other question is refurbished models. I have always discounted these previously, assuming they are more liable to issues than new models, perhaps I have been unfair. Tombolt, where have you picked up you referb models from? Do you go to a local supplier or is there a website that you trust?

Sorry for all the questions, but I want to make the right decision, for once.

Cheers,
ATB

On the battery front, I can't remember the specs, but I took delivery of a battery today that gives nearly 8 hours for £37 delivered (though obviously adds a fair bit of weight as you'd imagine)

If there's any specifics you want on the Acer let me know - I bought a load of them at the time and every person that took one couldn't believe how good they were

OK.

Have had a look round the 'net and gone hands on with a selection of kit at PC World & Best Buy and have decided I do like the Acera I have tried, but nowhere I tried has the 751 in stock so my final questions are as follows...

Ernie, the unit you recommend comes with 1Gb Ram and a 160Gb HDD, is it worth upping that to 2GB and say 250Gb along with the extended battery, and would doing this significantly impact on the battery life anyway? If I am going to notice a difference with 2Gb then it would be worth it but if not then I would rather save my money.

Finally, I haven't bought from the Technoworld website, does anyone have any experience. Don't wish to appear paranoid but is it worth possibly paying slightly more to go with a company I have dealt with previously.

Again, thanks for all the assistance.

AtB

Only you can answer the question about the disk size. It won't make a noticable impact on the battery, but it won't be noticably quicker either. It just gives you more space for stuff. Personally, my netbook doesn't ever have a lot of stuff on it.

As to memory, My netbook runs XP and I actually ordered the 2GB memory at the same time I bought the book. Honestly? It makes no difference at all to anything I do because I barely ever go over half a gig on it! Main reason I bought it was because it was £20 or so, and I was worried it may get more expensive.

I'm swapping out my 160GB HDD for a 64GB SSD. Improved load times and better battery life are more significant to me than raw space. I already bought the SSD last year, just need to get down to it... daft thing is, my pimped-up netbook will have cost double the £190 list price when I've finished

As JJ pretty much says, only buy the memory and space if you're gonna need it. I only installed 2 Gb cos my father was in a good mood and paid for it - heavily in my opinion, it was £35 at it's cheapest! (Really easy to fit too, wee panel at the back)

Also, there's only one available RAM slot, and 2Gb is the maximum, which means you'll be left with a 1Gb stick no matter what you do...

On the HDD front, are you the sort of person who would be ripping DVDs or utilising a big music collection? Or downloading like a demon?

Only then would I upgrade the HDD, personally.

Battery life I would upgrade with something generic anyway later on just cos it's so cheap to do. IIRC think you get 2.5-3 hours with the standard one. When new of course (!), though I'm still getting that today after months of heavy use. That's using Wi-Fi and often having the speakers blasting Guns N Roses via Spotify at full volume

Technoworld I haven't used myself, but I usually Google 'reviews' if that's the case. Often though, and maybe more than I should, I'll assume the credit card company will deal with it if it goes wrong

Won't you have to install Windows 7 (or Vista if you wanna muck around with it) as XP won't recognise the SSD? Or is there a way round that now?

Also, what's the physical size of an average SSD out of curiosity, will it just fit inside a netbook or will it require a bit of fastening? (I'll consider one myself in the distant future)

Io

I went to pc world because that's where the best deal was at the time I'd use any well known retailer or manufacturer in case you need any comeback. The battery died after three months and samsung didn't want to know. Pc world said that it was a consumable and tried it on, so I sent a letter quoting the sale of goods act and they refunded me the cost of a new battery from another website. 124 quid for a new battery was ludicrous and meant they would have lost all their profit. I would have thought they'd have cheaper suppliers. Either way, it was a bit of hassle, but saved me a hundred quid on a new one. Also, when the machine arrived it was in an original box and looked utterly brand new. Wouldn't hesitate to do it again despite the battery issue.

I'm getting a freebie netbook this weekend. I have no idea what it is yet though.

It's a standard 2.5" SATA drive and XP will recognise it as such; it just happens to not have a disk in.

The problem with XP is that it's not optimised to keep write cycles down, so it can wear out the flash unless you do quite a bit of tweaking. However, there's lots of info on what to do and how so it's not really a huge problem. I've had it on my XP desktop so I know it works, and I've got the utility to trim it.