I am facing a choice

what sort of software will be installed and what does your work entail that affect your laptop's requirements? Certainly there's something to be said for new versus older but the IBM brands of that vintage had a reputation for durability and reliability where as netbooks are "throw aways".

You must try out the netbook as the small keyboard and screen could be grounds for carpal tunnel and hunching over the machine. While I like netbooks (I own one for my demos) I would never place one into the workplace.
Bob

As far as Atom processors are concerned, you cannot run heavy softwares on it. when i mean heavy, high graphic designing, gaming cannot be done on it. Even if you require it for work, go for other processors.
But if i were to choose atom, i would just leave it!

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i agree with tom.. wen it comes to runing heavy applications atom processor will not be gud for that...

I had a Dell latitude D600 with a 1.4GHz Pentium M in it once, and that thing was amazingly fast. It ran windows Xp like my Macbook Pro runs Mac OS X. Boot time was something like 35 seconds, and programs responded instantly. It was great. I'd also have to agree with the others who've said that the Atom processor is not really meant for much heavy lifting. I've used other people's Atom netbooks, and none of them run even windows XP very well, much less Windows 7, even though they usually have more memory than my old Latitude (netbooks generally have 1GB, whereas the latitude had 512MBs). Plus, these old computers were the top of the line in their day, so they were meant to last a looooong time. Netbooks are the cheapest of the cheap and not very well constructed.