Asus eee PC

I'm thinking of splurging. My laptop, while functional, is aging rapidly and very bulky. With a 15 inch screen the thing is a beast. When I got it I was using it as my primary PC. The large size was preferable then, it was nice to have a larger screen when spending hours in front of it. Now though I have a dedicated box and monitor, the laptops primary use is as a (surprise!) travel computer. The computer weighs 8 pounds, which gets awful heavy in my backpack after awhile. The dimensions of the thing are more of an issue than the weight really. 14.5 x 11.5 x 1.8 inches is awfully big in a bag and even more unwieldy to carry by hand.

So, what I'm getting at is my laptop is too big for my needs and I'm thinking about a smaller one. The smaller one in question is the Asus eee pc, one of the hotter gadgets that were released in 07. The asus measures a tinsy wincy 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches which will almost fit in a pocket and practically disappear in a bag. The device is pretty stripped down technically. The processor is just under a Gh with 512mb ram and either 2 or 4Gb of flash hard drive space. It comes with a in house linux OS that is designed to be as user friendly as possible. It boots quick, loads apps faster and is designed to get users on line as simply as possible. It's also possible to strip off the kids gloves and use the KDE environ running under the surface which is a comfort to people like me who like to tweak the OS a bit.

The thing runs from $300 - $450 depending on hard drive space and the presence or absence of a webcam. Right now I'm thinking about the eee surf.
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/asus-eee-pc-4g-surf.aspx
4Gb of drive space and no webcam. The lack of HD space is a little troubling but with almost all my media now being hosted online on mp3tunes/flicker/googledocs I really only need so much room for apps. I think it'll work nicely.

Now the issue is convincing myself to acutally cough up the cash. More research is needed.

http://www.amazon.com/Screen-Celeron-Processor-Preloaded-Galaxy/dp/B000ZLSXJO/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1207418370&sr=8-1