Acer Aspire One - AOA 150

It's been a while now since I bought this little pretty powerful but definitely useful traveling companion.
For 300 bucks you'll have a good 1.6GHz Atom N270 Processor, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 160GB SATA HDD, integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi Certified, Acer Crystal Eye webcam, 3.5 mm audio out, three USB 2.0 ports and SDHC and multi-format media readers.
Everything in a computer with about 8.9 inches wide screen.
Some of these computers come with Windows XP SP3 Home Edition pre-installed and some of them come with a hilarious Linux version called Linpus.
Of course, for a smaller price you can get one with 120 GB HDD but my advice is: go for 160GB!
The battery lasts for approximately 120 minutes if you use Windows.
Another good advice : order one with 6 cells instead of 3 cells battery! It will double the autonomy !!
Everything works nice and pretty fast but unfortunately there are 2 important disadvantages:
1 - Some "scientists" thought that it's nice to have Windows XP pre-installed ALL IN DRIVE C ! So the hard drive has one big partition containing Windows. In case of system failure you're doomed ! You loose everything and the only method to reinstall your operation system is to use the recovery partition loaded somewhere in your hard drive.This is crap!
As crap is also the fact that you have no CD's containing drivers for your little notebook!
Okay, the little notebook comes with no CD/DVD device but as long as it has the capability to boot from an USB flash drive, I'd find a matter of common sense attaching to this little pack also an USB flash drive containing Windows XP and/or drivers for your computer. What the hell, a 2GB USB flash drive is only 5 damn bucks!!!
2 - If you have a last generation iPOD you'll have to download and install in your notebook the big crap called iTunes to help you load your music into iPOD. Once connected your iPOD to your computer everything changes in a very bad manner mainly affecting the speed of your computer because once installed iTunes is a damn shit consuming a lot of resources.
I also tried to install Windows Vista. It worked but you don't have audio drivers and, probably the most important, you don't have drivers for the wired and wireless network adapters.
I have tried to install different Linux distributions such as Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, SuSE, Fedora, Scientific Linux but with all I had in the end the same big problem : drivers for wired and wireless network adapters.
Yes, you can fix this problem for all aforementioned Linux distributions but you'll need to bang your head searching all kind of tutorials and then compiling the kernel in order to solve all problems that you might have after your system is up and running ( like webcam drivers and audio drivers ).
Now , after all this I won't keep you waiting anymore and I say that I found just the perfect operation system for your Acer AOA notebook. It's a Linux distribution called Mandriva Powerpack 2009 that is an "out-of-the-box "gizmo" solving all problems without having solid acknowledgments of Linux.
All tools provided with Mandriva Powerpack 2009 will help you manage documents ,edit and print pictures, listen music, connect, upload and download music, pictures and movies in and from your iPOD, watch on line shows, use Skype (already "embedded" into the operation system) with full audio/video features, surfing the net wired or wireless, watching movies from a connected USB flash drive with no trouble.
However, burning your own CD's or DVD's is possible only if you'll buy an external USB connected device.
More than that, Mandriva Powerpack 2009 is installed ( depending of the number of packages you want to install ) in 17 minutes and the battery will hold on around 140 minutes ( with a 3 cells battery)
Windows XP needs an hour to be installed with just a few features and the same 3 cells battery will barely hold on 120 minutes if you will not run too many applications in the same time.