Originally Posted by nkedel

All have at some kind of wifi; I'm not sure if any have 802.11n, and I doubt any still have only 802.11b, but the speed difference for portable surfing is going to be unimportant and virtually all 802.11g hotspots will still do b.

A few of Netbooks have mobile broadband (as well as wifi) through a cell provider - something even more common in some places outside the US where they are starting to sell subsidized by mobile phone companies - and you can get a USB stick for that from the cell provider. This requires an account, and for the ones with internal mobile broadband (often called "WWAN") your internal card will be specific to AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon (I don't know if T-mobile offers one.)



Many do, many don't.



Highly subjective. The Toshibas are worth trying, but some peope (myself included) hate the keyboards. In general, the keyboards are the biggest differentiators between machines, and there is no substitute for trying a bunch for yourself.

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Speed difference between the N270 (1.60ghz) and N280 (1.66ghz) is negligible. The better battery life of ones based on the N280 is the bigger difference between the two.



My usual advice is to nuke everything and start from a clean install... then add in only those apps absolutely needed.



Yup, although there is less variation in them then in full size notebooks, IMO.



Ergonomics are very important with a notebook or netbook, to be sure, but the questions are a bit different:
- good luck finding a stick or a combo stick/tranpad on a netbooks
- good luck even finding a normal "buttons on the bottom" trackpad on some of them many
- it's arguable what the line between a netbook and notebook; the 7" Eee is gone, 8.9" netbooks pretty much gone, and a lot of people are arguing the new 11.6/12" ones are really small notebooks.
- keyboard shape and quality varies a great deal more than on full size notebooks (IMO, at least)
- screen resolution is less variable, although there are a few 10" ones that have higher resolution.



Dell excludes the "low cost" installs of WinXP from the free upgrade program; other manufacturers may as well.





I use (probably someone inacurately remembered) a bit of the declaration, actually: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."







Upgrading XP to Vista was a bad business, and Vista to Win7 as well. It's a MUCH better idea to do a clean install, and manufacturers still install too much crapware.



Until the new chipsets come out, 2gb is the limit.

That said, Win7 runs much better than Vista on 1gb of memory, and that is with a Pro edition - there may be some tuning in some of the lower-end SKUs to make it run better on Netbooks.