I've got an Asus Eee 1000 HG which I use for Windows development, bought as a reconditioned ex-demo machine for about half retail. It's obviously slower than my main machine, but (by and large) quite fast enough for my day-to-day development usage with Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server. VS2010 is particularly useful for netbook development, having a lovely scalable default programming font and a zoom feature.

The one time I remember it being particularly slow for development was when I was doing some odd SQL Server testing and needed to return a couple of hundred results sets. The query wasn't very slow to run, opening that many results set in quick succession was. It's also not really fast enough for raw photo processing but then I'm not entirely surprised about that and it is usable in an emergency :-)

I know what others mean about inexpensive - for me this was as much testing the theory as anything, a dearer machine wouldn't have been bought on a whim. I can live with the limitations inherent in such a cheap machine, they don't cause me major issues.

The machine has about 4.5 hours battery life - that's good but it's taught me that with a small machine like this because it just lives in bags most of the time, the more battery life the better - it doesn't get automatically plugged in to use every night, so more battery life is better.

A better screen - higher pixel and colour resolution - would be appreciated but the existing one is perfectly usable.

I wouldn't have taken the punt on a dearer, higher spec machine when I already had a perfectly good main laptop, and I'm still getting significant added value from this cheap little thing from places I wouldn't / couldn't take the big main machine. If you can get a good deal, I'd recommend one to anyone - even at full retail if you've got a solid use case and are happy with the spec you've found.

The one time I remember it being particularly slow for development was when I was doing some odd SQL Server testing and needed to return a couple of hundred results sets. The query wasn't very slow to run, opening that many results set in quick succession was. It's also not really fast enough for raw photo processing but then I'm not entirely surprised about that and it is usable in an emergency :-)

I know what others mean about inexpensive - for me this was as much testing the theory as anything, a dearer machine wouldn't have been bought on a whim. I can live with the limitations inherent in such a cheap machine, they don't cause me major issues.

The machine has about 4.5 hours battery life - that's good but it's taught me that with a small machine like this because it just lives in bags most of the time, the more battery life the better - it doesn't get automatically plugged in to use every night, so more battery life is better.

A better screen - higher pixel and colour resolution - would be appreciated but the existing one is perfectly usable.

I wouldn't have taken the punt on a dearer, higher spec machine when I already had a perfectly good main laptop, and I'm still getting significant added value from this cheap little thing from places I wouldn't / couldn't take the big main machine. If you can get a good deal, I'd recommend one to anyone - even at full retail if you've got a solid use case and are happy with the spec you've found.