Buying it initially to travel with so I have internet access where wifi is available, but later will use it at home for surfing the web, checking email etc. Not into gaming or watching movies etc,but I’ve heard the netbooks are pretty slow even for surfing the web.

I have both a low-end 15″ Emachines (Acer) laptop (paid $298 at WalMart in March – incredible deal) and an Acer netbook. The netbook – which is a 11.6″ size – is perfect for traveling. It has a full-sized keyboard and a decent sized screen; any netbook smaller than 11.6″ will have a smaller keyboard that you may find a challenge to type on – or at least I would, as a touch typist. I like having both. The Acer is indeed a bit slow. For surfing the web, it is mostly adequate and I have lived with it while traveling for weeks at a time, but you have to watch what is running. Some websites with nasty flash ads eat up a lot of CPU and slow it down, so running some sort of ad blocker helps. I’m usually glad to get back to the regular laptop.

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A compromise might be one of the thin-and-light notebooks out there, that are kind of a mix of netbook and notebook. They aren’t SMALL per se but are generally thin and light and easier to travel with than a regular notebook – and tend to have very good battery life (a huge plus of my netbook as well). The CPU in the thin-and-light is probably an Intel “SU” series which is a low-power CPU that’s faster than the Atom you find in most netbooks but slower than a CPU you find in a regular notebook. Here’s an example of a thin notebook: (Not saying I recommend that one – but it’s the style I’m talking about.) It has a larger screen than a netbook. If you want to use it at home with a larger screen, you could always plug it into an external LCD monitor. If I had to live with only one laptop for everything, this is probably the type I’d get.