I've been using a Acer Timeline X series for about a year and a half now, so its starting to get a little dated, but I love this little machine. 10 inch screen, 500gb HDD, 6gb of RAM (4 out of box, 2 added when purchased in HKG for free), i5 processor and a 6 hour battery

Not a bad little package for the ~620USD$ I paid for it in HKG back in October 2010.

After reading this again I began jonsing for a new travel laptop. Saw the Samsung series 9 and it was all down hill from there. I just couldn't justify spending that much, even for a refurbished one. I ended up buying 2 gb of ram and a 128gb solid state hard drive for the gateway lt27 that I bought last year. So far so good. It runs surprisingly quick and boots up faster than my regular computer which has a much faster processor and more memory.

I couldn't agree more.... I have had one of these for about three months and the speed is night and day compared to the Dell net book I use to have.

Can anyone confirm the proper use of the Fn keys on the dm1z? It appears the only way they operate is if I also hold down the windows key so it becomes FN+win-F9, etc to get them to function.

Also, lots of bloat ware - I think I read somewhere that there was a clean image of windows on the recovery partition? Has anyone successfully "recovered" their brand new machine to a non bloatware version, or should I just wipe and re-install windows with my own copy?

Sounds like a malfunction to me. My fn key works fine alone.

Always best to reinstall clean; you should have the original product key on the certificate-of-authenticity sticker on the machine itself. If you don't have another copy handy, Microsoft's digital delivery partner (Digital River) allows legal download of the disk itself (google for the URL) and for a system without a built in CD, the DVD-to-USB converter tool ( http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/...usbdvd_dwnTool ) is VERY handy.