Third Time's The Charm?

As a previous owner of the 7 inch Asus Eee PC and the Dell Mini 9, I had become disenchanted with netbooks. The Eee PC was underpowered, had a keyboard suitable for toddlers, and was both noisy and butt ugly. The Dell Mini 9's keyboard is not useable by any technical person. Try hitting any of the following keys without slowing down: ', ", [, ], {, and }. Worst yet, the up arrow was on the same row as the right shift key. For someone who spends most of the day cursing at syntax-highlighted source code in vim, this is unacceptable.

Last week, C brought home the HP Mini Vivienne Tam Edition. I scoffed at this red and flowery overpriced netbook. However, after spending some time typing on it and browsing the web, I was impressed. So impressed that I went to Best Buy and bought the non-designer version, the HP Mini 1030.

This time around, I am restraining myself from wiping out Windows XP in favor of Ubuntu. We'll see how this little machine works out.