With several families of maps to download to the GPS and a desire to avoid as much as possible typing stuff on internet cafe PCs I thought a netbook was in order.

I'm not looking for the fastest but a small one with a decent battery life would be quite handy. WiFi, obviously and must have solid state disk drives as I don't want any mechanicals failing on me.

At the time, the winner was Asus' EEEPC 901 running XP (for MapSource), a 9in display 1024x768 (about the highest resolution at the time for the screen size), 2GB RAM and 12GB of disk (over two SSD drives).

in black.

You can even run/charge it off a cigarette adaptor.

The only real downside to it has been the 4GB first disk drive as MapSource (may it rot) insists on installing/expanding itself to c: and nothing can persuade it otherwise. I went through various machinations of clever drivers to cross mount windows disks but ultimately, when I wanted to install the map update it just fell over with a lack of disk space.

In the end, I used the nlite software to remove unrequired patch backups and other crap and just squeezed it on.