These have come down a lot in price and having found nothing on ebay to match shop/net prices I bought one new on the net for £175 brand new.All major retailsers now sell for this price.  We are not technical minded so this review is from a pure user who thought a netbook would be a good idea

Having bought the asus Eee -Staples- and finding the keys fiddly and screen too small we found some more cash and spent the extra £50 on the acer.We already have one standard acer laptop and have been pleased with it.The acer atom is an improvement all round on the asus but at the end of the day we have still ended up with linux and not windows xp or office so we are wondering if this craze for netbooks that we have joined,foolishly ? ,is hyped up by manufacturers ,who with decreasing laptop sales,have invented a new low end product because unless we spend at least £300 we get a basic slow running netbook with little storage and few facilities.Our home acer cost that,its not that heavy or large and is twice the value,as I said we were fooled by the cheap netbook hype.

We cannot knock the build quality or reiability of the acer. It is small and very portable-easy to have stolen ? and it does most of what it claims to do but we will now take the home laptop with us and opt out of the craze for netbooks.