My netbook is an old Sony Vaio SRX51P/B that I bought for £2000 back in 2001. It had sat on the shelf for a couple of years as the Lucent Orinoco WiFi chipset d

My netbook is an old Sony Vaio SRX51P/B that I bought for £2000 back in 2001. It had sat on the shelf for a couple of years as the Lucent Orinoco WiFi chipset didn't support WPA, had 256mb of RAM and the hard drive kept crapping out. I recently put a 30gb hard drive in, an atheros USB wifi stick and installed Arch Linux on there and it's fantastic. It's not as quick as a modern laptop but is more than capable of basic browsing and xterm-based fun. Aside from the two years that I haven't used it, the overall cost works out at roughly £250 per year. It has a 10.4" screen and aside from the memory is roughly comparable to an EEE PC 701 in terms of performance. I'm more than happy with it and it still holds a charge, 9 years later.