> I love my Imac 24". But for my research I have to travel abroad > periodically -- say, for up to 4-6 weeks at a time once a year. The > MacBooks are just too heavy, too clunky for the kind of travel and > fieldwork that I do. And MacAir is too expensive. So I have been > exploring the option of a Netbook. > > I need it to do all these very basic things:
Marcia, I don't know much about the phone/Internet part, but they all have USB ports, so I assume that would be OK. All the rest is no problem. You will, however, need more than some of the machines' minimal configurations to be happy with your experience. Dell's low end, e.g., is 512MB RAM and 4GB SSD, which would not be enough for what you want to do. And since you mentioned expense, one thing you might consider is buying a minimal configuration and upgrading it yourself. My son has a Dell Mini 9 which he upgraded to 16GB RAM and a 64GB SSD for much less than Dell wanted. It was easy, but I can only speak for the Dell--I don't know how easy this is for the others. (He runs MS Office on it without difficulty, by the way, although OpenOffice is certainly an alternative.) Here's one other thought. It's just a consideration, not a recommendation, since it has downsides as well as upsides. My son blew away XP on his netbook and replaced it with Windows 7; it works great and is much nicer than XP. If he had known he was going to do this, he could have bought the Ubuntu version of the machine instead of XP and saved $50. There are two downsides to this. First and most obvious, Win7 has not yet been released and is therefore technically still in beta. Although the Win7 beta has been remarkably without incident, and millions are already using it every day, this may not be for you. Second, it's not a money saver, since eventually you are going to have to pay for Win7. It is, however, a much more pleasant experience than XP. As I said, this is just something to think about. As for the machines themselves, one other alternative you might consider is the MSI Wind, which a lot of people like. The U120 model, for example, has a 10" WSVGA screen, a 160GB drive, a memory card reader, and a webcam, and can be had for just $327 and free shipping from buy.com (http://tinyurl.com/ofr8ug). It's only 1GB but it looks like it's easy to upgrade to 2GB for $20 or so (http://tinyurl.com/avtlk5). If I were buying a netbook today, I would look at the MSIs pretty seriously. Enjoy. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
