Toshiba Mini NB305-N410BN

Pros: 1. Lightweight, compact
2. Looong battery life, I get 9-10 hours per charge
3. Transition to Windows 7 was fairly painless, though I miss XP
4. Plays mp3 and mp4 video files with ease
5. Performs quite well when RAM upgraded to 2GB

Cons: 1. HD display would have been nice
2. Speakers are worthless, but wonderful audio with headphones or ear buds
3. With only one RAM slot, it was wasteful to pull out the 1 GB RAM memory and swap a 2GB card. Why not provide 2 GB and charge $15 extra?

Summary: I bought this netbook to stay in touch while on the road. However, it's so light and easy to use that I now find myself using it on the sofa or the patio table, which I never did with my older and heavier Lenovo T40. The T40's battery barely gave two hours on a full charge, which severely limited its portability. The Toshiba netbook's new processor is more energy efficient and I get ten hours of operation average between charges.

I bought a CD drive in order to load software that doesn't offer a download option. I already had a large collection of movies in mp4 format (conversions of DVDs I already own, originally converted for iPod use), so the lack of a CD/DVD drive is not a deal-breaker for me. Wireless card is "N" speed and works great with a high speed router.

The performance was greatly enhanced by swapping the supplied 1GB RAM for a 2 GB card. Put another way, the performance was less than stellar out of the box. There is only one RAM slot, so an upgrade means that you set aside the brand new, original 1GB card, which is somewhat wasteful. Given the $10-20 cost differential between a 1GB and 2GB RAM card, it would have made more sense to supply the netbook with 2 GB in the first place and charge an extra $10-15. If there were two slots, one could simply buy a second card, but with only one slot, why not give the product excellent performance right out of the box?