Cool Stuffs Review

I've been using an older Dell 14" laptop for several years for casual web surfing while watching TV and such. I saw one of these Aspire netbooks at the local Radio Shack and it caught my interest. Smaller than the laptop, MUCH lighter and yet still plenty big enough.
It came this week and here are my first impressions...
It's plenty fast! I can't tell any difference between this and the older Dell Inspirion I had. It's much lighter and yet still fits in my lap OK. The screen is smaller but still very readable for my over 50 yr old eyes. It does require more up/down scrolling to read websites but it's easy to do with the up/down keys. Speaking of those, they are very well positioned and easy to use, I like the combination of up/down/left/right and page up/down all together like they are.
I didn't like the scrollpad's option of page scrolling, kept getting in the way of just moving the mouse so I turned off that option in the control panel the first day and just use the up/down buttons on the KB.
The left/right click buttons take some getting used to, you MUST click out on the very end of the button bar for it to work properly.
The rest of the keyboard is about 90% size and easy enough to touch type on but I have slender hands. If you have big hands you need to try one of these first before buying.
Sound is good for movies and online video, if you want really good sound use a set of headphones. I already have DVD ripping software and several movies ripped for viewing on my Palm TREO, they play just fine on this machine AFTER I downloaded a free .avi viewer off the web.
1GB of RAM has been plenty so far for just surfing, email and such. The HD space is HUGH! My older desktop only has 80 GB and this is twice that! So I've got plenty of room. I copied my videos and music over my home wireless network so I'll have them handy on the netbook. Do this overnight if you have a large collection! Just copy all your 'my documents' over and let it run on the AC adapter overnight.
The WiFi connection had no problem with my Linksys network.
The first day I ran a battery test after charging fully overnight. It ran over 8 hours! I modified the power settings to keep the screen on and some disk access along with wifi going the whole time. That is VERY good.
I can see this will be just fine for home surfing and really handy for long plane or car trips. Rip a few of my favorite movies and watch them to kill the time! (I'd use the desktop for ripping and just copy the file over on the wireless network). The desktop will still be used for PC work that requires concentration, spreadsheets, paying bills, important stuff.
I dumped the McAfee antivirus and downloaded the FREE AVG Antivirus first thing. I also don't plan on using MS Office or Works, I'll use Google docs online for all of that and I can get a FREE viewer for Word, Excel, and Powerpoing from the Micrsoft website if I need to view one of those document from email.
I'm looking forward to using the netbook around the house, it's so portable and the battery lasts so long I can start an online video or streaming audio and carry it around anywhere....
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