Acer Aspire One Netbook, now slightly cheaper

The already inexpensive Acer Aspire One was one of our favorite Netbook-style laptops in our recent roundup ("Building the perfect Netbook"). It had a great design, a 9-inch screen, and Intel's Atom CPU, but we were less impressed with the paltry 512MB of RAM and middling battery life. But if you skipped Windows XP for the Linux version, you could get one for $379, making it a fairly good bargain, overall.

Acer seems to have heard our complaints, and while the company is not actually changing any of the hardware, it is dropping the prices on the different configurations in the line, making it an even better deal. It probably doesn't hurt that there's been a marked increase in competition in this relatively small category lately, and that's even before Delland Lenovo get into the game.

The new prices and configurations are as follows:

Intel Atom/Linux/512MB RAM/8GB SSD/3-cell battery: $329

Intel Atom/Windows XP/1GB RAM/80GB HDD/3-cell battery: $349

Intel Atom/Windows XP/1GB RAM/160GB HDD/6-cell battery: $399