Not too much shop or project work recently. I’ve been at the PC most of the time working on a couple of projects.

Speaking of PCs, I finally got us a Netbook computer. Since I’m late to the Netbook party, I decided to go with a vendor that was also late to arrive: Toshiba. The nice thing is that they looked at the stuff that sucked about Netbooks (like unusable keyboards, limited ports, crappy screens) and fixed the problems.

They have two generations out now, their 300 and 200 series. If you need a knock-around Netbook, take a look at their 1st gen NB 205 models.

Here’s a great money saver: Get the white one from Buy.com. The black/brown/etc models are running about $329. If you buy the white one (which is no longer listed on the Toshiba site) you can get it for $289. That’s $40 off just because of the color! The killer joke (as Evelyn would say) is that only the cover and bezel is white — everything else is silver! So save your money and get the white one. It actually looks quite nice. (The photo above is the brown one. The white is exactly the same except for a white bezel around the screen and a silver rounded area.)

Toshiba NB205-N325WH at Buy.com

Update: As of March 2nd they don’t appear to have this killer deal anymore. Sorry about that. I guess I lucked out.

Now keep in mind that it’s not the latest Netbook, but it will run you three bills instead of four or five. You can read a good review of it on the Maximum PC site: Review

I’ll let you know how it works out. I’ve been spending the afternoon removing all the crapware, in-place upgrading to Windows 7 Pro (it comes with Windows 7 Starter), and getting full versions of Office, etc, on it. We’ll see how the power situation is.