I have a new toy – a netbook. I have wanted one since last Christmas. I almost got one before we went to Borneo but G convinced me to wait. I think he did not want one more item to take with us and potentially lose.

I am glad that I waited. I was looking at the models that they have at Costco. These are the Acer and the HP. I liked the keyboard on the HP but the battery life was terrible – two hours. I did not like the Acer’s keyboard or touchpad.

We have had a discussion recently on Slow Travel forum and one of our members mentioned that she recently purchased the Samsung N110. I had read several good reviews. I liked the fact that the keyboard was 93% size of a typical laptop.

I took a trip to Best Buy to see if I could try one out. They did not have any on the floor and did not plan on getting any more in stock until Windows 7 shipped. Hmmmm… I did not want to Windows 7. I prefer XP. I decided to go ahead and purchase it without trying it out.

I checked around at the prices on Pricegrabber, Bing and a review link. I found it at Newegg for $344 with no shipping fees and no taxes. It was a little less expensive at a couple of other sites and I could have gotten a Bing cashback but I decided to go directly with Newegg.

I ordered it on Saturday and it arrived today via UPS ground from Southern California. It was easy to setup. One tip is when it boots the first time after configuring XP, the Samsung utilities will make a backup of the original installation. If you click advanced, you can choose the partition size. It will default to a 50-50 partition, I decided to go with 40-60 to make a larger partition for data.

I love the keyboard. The spacebar is just about at the right spot, it has raised notches on the J and F key which helps keep my hands oriented on the keyboard, the shift keys are in the right spot and the cursor pad keys are friendly. The touchpad is a little hard to get used to. I haven’t used one much so it might take a bit. I do like the scrolling bar on the side and the mouse buttons are easy to use. It will a little bit to get the highlighting technique mastered.

I have FIOS which comes with a wireless router. My desktop was directly connected and so this was the first time I had connected via wi-fi. It was a snap to get on. It is also pretty fast. I am now installing and configuring my utilities. I downloaded Firefox so I can get rid of the ads and speed up my browsing. I am also trying a free photo editing program – PhotoScape. I used it to edit these pictures.

I’m extremely happy and satisfied with the netbook.