Having recently started a new job that involves a lot of travelling up and down the country I decided to splash out in a small, affordable laptop/netbook so that I could keep myself productive whilst sitting on trains for hours on end.

The eee pc 901 was recommended to me and initially I was dubious as it was much cheaper than anything else of a similar size that I had seen (it really is tiny) and the versions most widely available support open source software rather than the Microsoft Office packages that I am used to. Being a bit of a computing Luddite, this worried me. However my fears were proved unfounded when I took the plunge and bought it. The eee pc 901 came loaded up with everything that you could realistically need of a small laptop/netbook and all the programs can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Office documents meaning that if someone emails you a Word document you can open it, read it and edit it and then send it back to them for them to be able to do the same. Perfect and very quick.

Also very quick and easy is connecting to wifi hotspots and the internet. Everything is built in so you literally just have to be in range of a wifi hot spot and click on button to connect. The eee pc 901 also fully supports USB drives and has 2 slots. This is particularly handy if you want to use a mouse or supplement the system's relatively small hard drive by using USB dongles.

The relatively small amount of storage space on the eee pc 901 could be an issue if you wanted to store large amounts of music or video files on there but you would do well to fill it with Word and Excel documents. So whilst this isn't a real downside, the tiny size of the keyboard is. It is not really the manufacturer's fault that the keyboard is so small, it is more the nature of the beast. However it is difficult to use and even after around a month of regular use my touch typing is notably worse than it is on a desktop.

Don't let that put you off though. If you are looking for a small machine to use primarily for work and are on a budget, then I can not recommend the eee pc 901 enough.