My wife is a die-hard Mac user. Her reasons are simple enough. It does what it needs to do and of course, she can sync her iTunes library with it. But that is on the desktop. We also own a couple of Eee netbooks. Her Eee is the 8.5 hour model, mine the 11 hour option. In both cases, these battery life estimates must be in standby because the life of the batteries are closer to 5-7 hours, give or take various activities.

My wife’s Eee happily runs Windows 7 starter edition. Everything works great, as advertised — no complaints. The only bug I have found is that sometimes the power-management thinks that it’s still plugged in.

Back on my Eee, I am running a the latest Ubuntu 10.04 netbook release. Once you consider the resolution provided and get used to the differences, this is the release specifically calibrated for netbooks and it shows. As with Windows 7, everything works out of the box. Wi-Fi, webcam, power-management, etc. So this works out well for me. The bug, in this case, for Ubuntu would be that my silver suspend touchpad button doesn’t work. I found a simple alternative with a GUI program called ”touchfreeze” that fits the bill just great. It docks next to my clock, and I just toggle it from there. And if I need my touchpad, it can be set to disabled while typing.

So where does this leave me on operating systems, netbooks, and the like? Honestly, no reason to change what is working for my wife. Despite being a Mac user, she is fine using Firefox on Win 7 — clearly no reason to start messing with that.

On my end, I am just used to Ubuntu. It’s what I use every day, therefore I’ve never even booted this netbook to Windows once. Seriously, it’s never even been fully booted into Windows and Ubuntu was the first OS run on it. So that was a good match for me.

Netbooks vs. notebooks? Well, honestly the netbook doesn’t really replace the notebook on many levels — lack of optical driver, screen size, etc. But for writing and doing many other minor Web based tasks, you can’t beat it for what it provides. I would say for those who spend most of their time on a desktop and want something with crazy battery life for a reasonable price, consider a netbook. The Eee is a household favorite around here, that’s for sure.

[awsbullet:eee netbook]