My laptop has seen better days, it's had it all, viruses, broken mouse buttons, blue screen all the kind of stuff a 2 1/2 year old laptop gets over it's lifetime. It's a miracle it still works to be honest. Anyway yesterday one of the hinges on the screen cracked and subsiquently (meaning after I tried to fix it) broke off.

Anyway I have decided that now is the time I need a new laptop, I have no money so my dad has agreed to lend me £300 in order to get one.

Anyway, I have been looking at some replacements. I have been considering two things.

1. Buying a netbook as it is much smaller and lighter. I walk a lot so this may be good for me as my current laptop is heavy, also it is fairly cheap.

2. Buying a linux based laptop, I only do word processing, spreadheets and surfing on my laptop. I hear linux performs pretty well if you ignore compatibility. Also many netbooks are linux based so I have a wider option.

I don't care about games as I have a PC just for gaming. Memory isn't an issue either as I keep most of my work stuff on an external HDD anyway as backup.

So what do you think? Shall just get a regular ol' laptop? Are netbooks any good?

Also if anyone has linux I would love to hear opnions such as what is word processing like? is openoffice any good? Is it compatible with word? Can I get MS word emulated or something similar?

If you decide to buy a standard laptop and put Linux in it, problems you most likely meet are GPU drivers and WLAN drivers. Everything else should work just fine.

Openoffice works like MS Office, atleast from what i've used both. Powerpoint may be the most trickiest to get to work properly (atleast it was three years ago, the last time i opened powerpoint file). Adobe Reader is available for PDF (openoffice doesn't yet support the latest PDF), but it has to be downloaded from Adobe site.

Anyway, if you get a laptop/netbook with pre-installed Linux, you should be able to get everything working very easilly.

If you're new to linux, get a laptop with Linux pre-installed. That takes care of all the compatibility problems you might have and you save some money for not paying the windows tax.

I've converted my mom from windows to ubuntu (she had a virus problem with windows) and she didn't have any problems with replacing microsoft office with openoffice (she uses word and powerpoint). So if she had no trouble whatsoever (she is not very good with computers in general), I don't think you will.

Now, about netbooks. Things you might have to look at are keyboard comfort , battery life and operating systems. I'll comment on the eeepc as it's the one I use. The keyboard is kind of small, so it might bother you to do any lengthier work. I solved this by carrying a mat keyboard with me to do that. The battery is amazing and I think it's the best you get around. The operating system is linux, but I found the one that came with it to be very limited. I installed the netbook version of ubuntu and find it amazing.

Ohhh... and get one with a solid state drive and not a hard drive. These will usually have less memory storage, but it's much faster and the battery lasts longer. Completely worth it for me.

Hope this helps. ;)

Thankyou for the help guys, it has been well appreciated. The eeepc looks good, I may go with that. I know this sounds silly, but does it have a monitor output at all?

Edit, just looked it up, it should work an an old LCD monitor I have.

According to Wikipedia, atleast the 900 series has VGA output.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC#Display

I've too heard from a few eeePC users that it's better with Ubuntu than Xandros.