My wife goes away on business trips quite a lot which inevitably means quite a lot of sitting around getting bored. She would like a small (10″) note book to take with her. Mainly for email, browsing, but would also like MS Office on it for simple doc writing.

I notice on these threads that many people suggest getting 2gb memory upgrades, would this be necessary for her needs?

I would like to get her a machine that would hold a charge for 6 or 7 hrs min.

Finally do they come with small chargers or are they the same size as normal laptops?

Any recommendations, or machines to avoid, would be really useful.

BB

iPad?

Ok it hasn’t got MS office on it, other programmes can do the same. They are small and light, battery on mine easily lasts a couple of days for simple browsing.

Second the iPad. Having being (quite ridiculously!) opposed to them, now I’ve got one I think it’s ace – and would be perfect for your wife’s needs as described above!

We do have an iPad but she needs a notebook.

Notebook or netbook? Have you got a budget? A netbook would do for light Office use, but the lower resolution screen would be a pain for heavier work (large spreadsheets, for instance). Depends what she’s going to be doing with it really.

The 2Gb upgrade thing is a drum I keep beating for netbooks. They all come with 1Gb as standard due to following hokey restrictions imposed by Microsoft in order to secure considerably cheaper Windows licences. Doubling the RAM has a massive impact on performance.

Small, cheap, not fast = netbook ( look for previous threads – the Acer Aspire seemed to be well recommended )

Small, fast, not cheap = Thinkpad X series

i use a samsung n110 with win7. yes – i upgraded to 2gb which was very easy to do indeed, however crucial’s ram finder ( or whatever ) suggested incompatible ram the first time, so double check.
the thing came with xp, but the install of win7 was pretty painless. think i only had to download a driver for the wifi.
it runs nicely. not super-rapid but quick enough for my purposes when travelling. it’s compact enough to slip easily into my bag and it’s light. it’s been around for a couple of years and hasn’t missed a beat, and will run for ~ 9 hours on a full charge.
i’d throw 4gb in if i could ( but stick with 32bit windows – there’s a trade-offf going to 64bit just to utilise the extra 1/2gb that 32bit can’t ‘see’ ), but as i say, it runs pretty well as it is.
nice clear screen, good size touchpad, and importantly, the keyboard is also good.
i like the screen so much i bought a full-size monitor for use on my desktop, and when i finally come to replace my crt tv (!), i will probably go samsung again.
be worth looking to see if samsung have brought out an updated version i expect, but they’re still on sale.
HTH.

Seriouslly though I’m running a samsung nc10 with 2gb of Ram and a 64 GB solid state hard drive and it’s pretty much perfect for everything apart from watching web video.

Asus eee 901 here, one with a 3G SIM card slot. It’s GREAT! 16gb SSD, and with a 2Gb memory upgrade, it plays iplayer and the like just fine.

Come up on ebay pretty cheap.

The 10″ eee’s are nice too, and if they had a SSD I would have got one of those instead. Similar to the 901 but a bigger screen.

If you don’t mind second hand [EDIT – or refub’d], and don’t mind watching a few on ebay over a week or so, you can pick up some brilliant bargains.

Also, a good plan with any netbook running windows is to go to the system performance settings and turn off most of the visual effects – speeds up windows dramatically IME.