I decided to get a little Notebook instead of a Netbook. My thinking was I may be on this thing for a few years so get something that has a little horsepower in it. I purchased a Sony Vaio - the littlest one. I recieved it today and it looked real bad for the first hour I had it. I updated the drivers on it and on the reboot it hung and stopped working. I tried Sony's online chat for support. A total waste of time - they pointed me to a webpage and said bye bye. The time it took them to respond to each line I typed took forever. They did give me a number to call and while I was on the phone with support I decided to try the things I know to get it running and it worked.

It has been running for a few hours now and it is pretty nice. I just need it for email, managing my NAS server, which has been sketchy for a few weeks and browsing the web. As it has an HDMI port - I will try and hook it to my TV just for giggles to see how well it performs. But the keyboard works well, it is very light and running wireless (g mode) it has been very quick. It has Windows 7 premium on it and the operating system stinks. They did improve network connectivity over Vista but that would be all that I care about. They changed where everything is from XP so finding things are a chore again. When I moved my bookmarks from Firefox it wouldn't just by copying the profile and updating the ini file. I had to use Mozbackup. Good news Mozbackup is free and works very well.

Sony put in a hidden partition so I think I will be able to restore the base system easily enough. I will have to read up on it to be sure. They have a bunch of crapware on the machine and I have started to de-crap it. The only thing which I have to say conerns me is the power connection. It is flimsy and doesn't look like it will last very long. When I use it - I unplug it and then replug when I set it down again. I still have to get used to the trackpad thingy. I was spoiled with high quality IBM laptops at work for years that had the little red rubber thingy which made moving the cursor around a breeze. Let's see if I can adapt. All in all it is brand new so let me beat on this for a few weeks and see if it still runs as good as does now.