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I'm getting an Acer Aspire One A150 with a 120GB HDD later this week.

It seemed to be a better choice than EEE because of the keyboard, CPU and overall bang for buck.

I've had MSI Wind for 2 months now and am happy with the choice. It's small but not too small (like first Eees, really unusable for text editing and browser due to their small screen and tiny keyboard), it's light and handy, has most useful connectors (PC-slot for HSDPA modem is missing but I read they want to correct it). It's also silent (I terribly hate noisy computers) and doesn't heat too much. It's well made, you can grab it by one corner of the casing and lift and it won't break (really, Acers can do that ;). There are now about a dozen of very similar products from other producers, also new Eees are better than the first ones. Anyway, my Wind has already earned what it costed so I won't complain.

I'll just add one word of advice: avoid some of the older subnotebooks like the plague. I recently worked on some of the older MSI ones here (not sure if it's the first 'wind' one or something before, but it has a built-in VOIP phone next to the screen) and it's HORRIFICALLY slow. Like, serious torture to get anything done. Apps regularly crash because the disk is so slow! Urgh!

Fei: I know acers have a reputation of being kind of fragile (and I know that reputation is justified to some extent) but the Aspire One feels really solid and robust. I can easily hold it by one corner without seeing it fall apart ;)

i just got my eeepc 901 (winxp) last week. i'm very happy with it, it feels great, is very fast, and has great long battery life (for now, at leasy).

my biggest to reasons to prefer it over the MSI wind (which basically has better specs for the same prize) is exactly that (battery life; it has no HD but an SSD and a somewhere-built-inside SDHC, no moving parts), and the fact that i felt 10" was too big for something that's supposed to be tiny. oh and i didnt buy and aspire one because it's so horrifically ugly :-) (somehow, this matters more to me for toys than for real computers)

basically, i can do a whole working day, with occasional hibernation/standby'ing, without recharching. which is great for taking notes at all kinds of trainings and meetings; the word "notebook" comes to mind again.

side question: what's the best way to prevent batteries from losing lifetime? my older laptop (2.5yr old now) started with 4 hours of battery life and is down to about 10 minutes now, which basically turned it into a desktop that i can easily bring places. i'd like to prevent the same happening with my eee, but am not sure how; both the internet and the manual don't really seem to know...

Haha, for me one of the reasons not to buy an eee pc was that it was so damn ugly :D different tastes strike again

I heard that the best way to keep the battery in good shape is in fact to recharge it as often as possible (for Li-Ion batteries at least) according to what people have told me and what I found when googling for "prolong battery life". Especially this seems to cover it well.

Thats where I got the idea :) Although most netbooks seem to use 1024x600 displays nowadays.

first of all, this all greatly depends on the quality of the battery which varies a lot for each laptop vendor

what i always do is try to use the battery frequently, but never deplete it fully (or at least not keep it in a fully depleted state for a less than short while)

that and buying a laptop known for good battery performance (such as *shrug* a mac)

i once worked on some kind of expensive dell laptop (wasnt mine, and dead ugly but thats not the point) and it's battery performance was laughable but i think that was just because they slapped random components into a case quickly instead of actually 'developing' a laptop

oh and those eee things are cute!

stijn, thanks for the link! it's a good list of tips indeed, and seems better informed than the guy on irc who told me to completely discharge and then recharge every time (and yes, he was talking about li-ion). :-)

niels, good point. if anyone cares, it's a fujitsu siemens. i've no clue if it's me or the computer. i did tend to leave the power cable in at all times, which maybe indicates sloppy circuitry rather than battery problems.

oh, eh, d'oh. i should've thought when i read that page stijn posted.

my laptop has a tendency of getting super hot. temperature is, apparently, crucial to battery life time. i.e. either the laptop's ventilation sucks, or something's just stuck in mine which i never managed to fix, but nevertheless of course it's the heat of the thing which caused the battery to suck so fast.

that would be *really* sloppy circuitry then.. i guess we can say the battery's long term performance is a sum of the overall build quality of your device. just noticed that the battery on my laptop indeed is in the spot where the least heat builds up..

I have an acer laptop, it's more than 4 years old, and it still works fine. It went to the ground a few times, it was some cracked corners... I had to buy a new LCD inverter once.

I got my EEE 701 quite early as they arrived here in Germany and hadn't to regret the buy since then. It survived breakpoint and managed to get me ahold of coding in the processing IDE to keep myself a bit into coding.
Battery life is ok and serves the purpose for me. It's quite frankly nothing more than a toy and that's what they are made for: toying around (not in a "Marc Ecko's Getting Up"-way). :)

too small for serious work and too big to fit in my pocket. too bad, they're nice machines but i prefer pda (+classic notebook)

Soon the new Medion Akoya Mini E1210 (german) will be available. Bigger disk, but only a usb-bluetooth adapter (duh). Don't understand why they couldn't fit that one into the casing though...

But the über-netbook is the Asus N10. Geforce 9300M sounds nice!

Received my eee PC 901 last week, so far very happy of it :)
Advice: Buy the Linux version, even if you plan to have Windows running on it. This way you get 20 GB of SSD instead of 12.
I installed ubuntu-eee instead of Xandros, and I can keep it on battery for about 5 hours. Heard that with Windows you can have a longer time.

I buyed a Medion Akoya Mini (similar to the MSI Wind - exception : no bt, other wlan card) and installed Mac OSX 10.5.4 on it. It's running super smooth with CoreImage HWAcc and QuarzExtreme enabled in the native 1024x600 resolution.
Now it's a great cheap small Macbook, and i'm extremely happy with it.
For more information see this howto and this wiki, or drop me a mail.

i just ordered an acer aspire one a110l, hopefully it will arrive by tuesday. i am excited like a little boy awaiting christmas! =)

does anyone know if it is possible to install windows 200 on it? i dont like xp too much, it demands much more resources than 2k, and 2k can do everything i need on this machine (filemaker, word, internet). but i havent found any experiences with win2k on aspire one on the internet (while there are reports about good win2k performace on eeepc)...

dip: why not try linux?

just like gentleman - give linux a try. not sure what filemaker is all about, but linux basically offers a lot of things that you're used to from windows. http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/ is where you want to go.

(i just read you got an aspire! uh, does eeebuntu work on the aspire? computer might say yes! :D)

i dont really want to learn operating a complete new operating system. i need the machine for work and my work is 0% computer-related. i am a historian working in the archives and i need to use filemaker because my professor uses it so all the data i am gathering can be used for our projects. i doubt that linux + wine + filemaker would be a really good solution on a machine that is not super-powerful. plus, i just spent a couple of hours reading about linpus (the linux installation on aspire one) and it really seems to be a heap of shit.

i am coming back from moscow tomorrow, the notebook gets delivered on tuesday, and in 2 weeks i am off to moscow again to continue working in the archives, and by then the machine has to be 100% operable. not enough time to learn a new os.

i really really hpoe i manage to install win2k on it... but it's really weird - i have been googling for it for hours and it seems that noone has tried it out! :(

Do you have an external CD player? I suppose it really wouldn't be a problem then. If you'll need to install it from a USB drive it might be a bit more difficult but perhaps you can just follow the procedure one would follow when installing XP from USB? Here's a tool for preparing a stick for that.