[Elvandil]

Originally Posted by guy2

Are these cheap machines upgradeable?

I wouldn't mind buying one for a carry around ,looking at formulas and such.

7inch would be good for glancing at i guess and getting dirty

XO LAPTOP is what is was thinking

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trk...All-Categories

The 7" Chinese ones can have more storage on SD cards. There are 3 USB ports, but one is to connect to as PC for synching addresses. But the OS is on a chip and can't be changed. And though they say you can watch YouTube, not true. There is no Flash for Windows CE.

The trouble with these is that for just about the same price, you can get a "real" netbook, which is really a laptop with no optical drive, for the same price.

Here's an Acer for $294: http://www.google.com/products/catal...wAw#ps-sellers

They mix the Chinese 300 MHz ones right in with the real netbooks because they are in the same price range:

http://www.nextag.com/discount-netbo...F6D54CE95FB133

[bp936]

I would always prefer Toshiba, had a lot less problems with it.
I also don't like the little screens, and that they don't have a CD or DVD drive, I buy programs, can't download anything on dial up. You have to consider that too.
With a 250 GB drive, you will want to put some programs on it.

I only heard bad stries about the little notebboks, once they had it.
My old Acer desktop 10 years ago was good, but now, relatives with Acer have a lot of motherboard problems.

[dannyn]

I agree Brett. That is a pretty good deal. I would see if you can get more RAM if you can afford it... Windows 7 magically eats it all.

[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by dannyn

I agree Brett. That is a pretty good deal. I would see if you can get more RAM if you can afford it... Windows 7 magically eats it all.

I purchased the 1525 its predecessor about 18 months ago for 500 bucks at best buy.....2 gigs of ram, core dou.firwire.hdmi etc..all of the jacks and ports you ever need....the radio for wireless has a switch that can be held to look for net works without booting the machine...the media center can be booted independently of the os....recovery partition as well as windows disk, drivers disk..dell diagnostics disk....i am using 7 now so i cant boot the media center independently anymore...but all of the extras work perfectly....On the dell site there are xp drivers available as well...so I can run xp vista or 7 without any problems...I have also had ubuntu on it without the ususal problem of having to fix the sound and wireless that happens with alot of laptops..People also take the 1525 and put OSX on it {not legal}..but it does show how versatile the machine is...It runsfine with 7 on it but I dont use any heavy adobe products..I have seen where I could use more ram after running the media center as it lags for a bit after it has been used...other than that runs pretty decent....The alps touchpad is something less than to be desired though..I see they seem to be picking up on the market with other vendors as well.

[JohnWill]

Personally, I'd go for the Toshiba.