I'm looking at a netbook on sale for $199. It's a Dell that comes with an 8GB solid state drive, 512MB RAM DDR2 and Ubuntu Linux version 8.04.1. I have never owned a laptop because they always seemed to expensive and I like my desktop computer. I was thinking of getting this as something I can go online with, type word documents, and maybe listen to music/watch movies via a memory stick. Could this laptop meet those needs? For a mere $200, I'm not expecting anything amazing, but I don't want something that crawls and can't do anything without taking forever. Does this sound like a good deal? I personally have never seen a laptop for less than about $250. This seems like a great deal to me, but I don't know.

It could absolutely meet those needs. However if you can get a bit more ram that would be good. If you're the type who opens a dozen websites at a time + your word processor + playing mp3's... you'll exceed the 512MB of ram. If you're a more conservative user however don't worry about it. This laptop will absolutely meet those needs. It MAY even boot faster than a $1-2k pc just because of the speed of the solid state drive. (depending on the processor) CodyBane++ web application development

That netbook is fine as it is for simple tasks. It is a version of ubuntu that can be used by most people.. It is LINUX by the way so you will have to learn some things. For the most part every task you do in XP you can do in ubuntu if you know the correct name of the task. It is not a laptop as such. It is a baby laptop sort of. But, as you say, $200+ is pretty cheap. One time that display (just the lcd part) was $2000 in lots of 10,000. It will not be as fast as modern laptops. It may suffer on video depending on format and such. See forums for these and consumer reviews. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Thanks guys. I went ahead and decided to buy it. A bit of an impulse purchase perhaps, but I've always wanted something portable since my cell phone is a piece of junk that can't go online and I use a big desktop PC. I never wanted to spend more than $200 and this thing looks much cuter than the Eee PCs anyway. In all, it was $218 with shipping and tax, which seems really cheap. I could've upgraded the RAM, but for half the price I can buy 2GB of RAM online and install it myself if I want more juice. (Apparently Dell's Mini 9 is super-easy to open and swap out.) I think being able to learn Linux will be cool, and apparently this comes with an optional special edition of Ubuntu that is easy for Windows users to navigate. So, we'll see how it goes. My only concern at this point is Dell's customer service. I hope it doesn't take forever to get here. I've read horror stories of these netbook orders being delayed for months. I also signed up for a Dell credit card to get 3% instant savings -- the APR is 20% so I need to make sure I pay it off immediately. That said, if I see something better for $200 in the next few weeks, I will be kicking myself. The sale ends tomorrow if anyone else is interested.

I actually have a question. This $200 Mini 9 is the cheapest laptop (netbook) I've been able to find. Now why is it impossible to get something like this, an 8GB SSD netbook, below $199, but this other netbook I've found online now has 120 GB HDD and it's only $100 more than that? My cutoff was $200, which is the only reason I bought the Mini 9, but then I see stuff like this: http://tinyurl.com/d5e42g -- an Acer Aspire One for $298 -- and I think maybe I can afford another $100. I probably don't NEED 120 GB... but when I compare that to the 8GB SSD I'm getting here, the difference seems huge. Can anyone make sense of this for me?

The Acer Aspire One with 160GB hd 1GB ram and win xp is 299 at COSTCO and was the same at Office Depot.

Thanks. That did not help me at all, wizard-fred. I'll check out those articles. But if anyone can explain why the prices are so similar for a huge HDD and a small SSD, that'd be great.