1. Don't get a Linux system, not yet anyway.

2. The Acer comes with an SD slot. If you can find an Acer with Vista, then you can stuff an 8 gig SD card in it, and it will ask if you want to use the card to speed up the computer. Just say yes.

3. I don't know your situation, but there is no DVD or CD drive on a netbook. 'Tis too small.

4. I see no great speed difference in genterating songs with ALL Realtracks between my souped up 10 gig memory Vista HP media box and the Acer other than a few seconds, like maybe 6 or something, but I 'm willing to run a speed test.

5. Band in a Box on the external hard drive is cool. I added all the thousands of band in a box music files I have, plus the 3 Norton books for Mantooths chord changes, and it works great on my accoustic piano with the wee Behringer mixer, line out to the mixer and if I'm using midi I either stick the JV1010 or the Ketron between the system with an Edirol Midi cable. I'm not doing midi in with the accoustic piano of course, but I usually set the system to transpose the music so I can play horn watching the netbook on the 2nd verse and use the piano for verses 1 and 3 out of the music books on the piano.

6. The netbook is great, lookup how to tweak speeds etc. And if using live disable the network stuff.

7. Right now I'm not able to sleep, just back from brass band practice so I'm a bit jacked up, a rye and water will cure than in 30 mins, but I'm typing this on the wife's netbook on the home wireless network, and my son is downstairs running some interent game, while my Ubuntu system is helping out with some great math problem related to a health network, cause if I'm off it for more than 30 minutes it fires up and runs pieces of some program that is running on thousands of computers to achieve mainframe type supercomputer results using distribted computing....and I see no slowdowns.

8. We took the netbook to Cuba and I took 1200 photos, mostly of old cars (wow) and dowloaded them daily to the netbook and took it to the bar, amazed the heck outta the help. Got rid of the bunch of horn oil I took and gave away.......

9. I'd buy 2 myself, one running linux and the other Vista. With the sd slot the thing runs great....and you can add a hub to boost the 2 usb ports.....

"Have Fun!" ..the quotes are due to plagerism of Mr. PG himself.

Oh and 10. I can unplug the usb hard drive with the ultra pack and in seconds start band in a box on our netbook, my hp desktop, my old laptop, or the old desktop upstairs. I can take to a friends house and run a demo. That's beyond cool because the application does not need to wright to the registry...amazing that...

John Conley
Musica est vita