Originally posted by: syadnom
BTW...the real advantage of the SSD over the 120GB drive is that you'll have better battery life
this is not true. it sounds true but toms hardware did an extensive test and found that SSDs do not have low battery life because they alway use the same amount of power and never spin down or have periods where they use less power. A traditional hard disk may use 50% more power during reads and writes but can use 50% less power during idle states. 4w for 1 hour constantly(SSD) vs 6w for 15 minutes and 3w for the other 45(HD) and the hard disk has save 12.5% (4w vs 3.75w)
If you drop the thing, the screen will break. you wont lose the data but you will lose the unit.
The SSD drives in all of the netbooks are slow. They may compare reasonably with a 4200rpm laptop drive but they are certainly not on the level of the new high performance models that can do 100+MB/s.
4GB or 8GB sucks! a 120GB hard drive will give you slightly better battery life and 15x the storage as well as perform slightly faster.
I have an acer one. It is a great unit. I have 1.5GB / 120GB. I got XP and it is nice and quick. Programs run slow due to the low powered atom but it is impressively quick for the form factor. I can take my one on trips so I can photoshop or hugin up photos without lugging around a huge laptop.
The one is great, much better than the asus units that I looked at. The wind looks comparable. A guy at work got the dell and it is pretty nice too but the acer seems to be the nicest.
My advice is to get the standard disk until the next generation of these that have a faster, more efficient SSD. Make sure that you get the slow DDR2 533 and not anything higher as faster ram eats more power even when not running at the higher speed.
The biggest drain on the battery is the screen so get aggressive with your screen settings. download one of the many utilities to help manage your screen and turn everything down as far as you are comfortable with and save 20% of the battery life easy. Also, mute the sound when you dont need it. The audio chips are in a lower power state when muted.