As a computer, my Asus 1005HA is a bit small in screen and keyboard, but I 
just found a neat way to work with it very easily:  I installed an ssh 
server.  I connected to it with "ssh -X" and did a few things that used X 
(emacs, viewing a photo with eog).  It was very responsive.  No trouble.

I recently tossed out an old Sun computer that was purchased about 12 
years ago for about $12,000.  I hear that everyone was drooling over that 
thing when it first came in (I inherited it in 2001).  Now it's about 
worthless.  It had 640 MB of RAM and dual 167 MHz processors.  My new 
netbook has 2000 MB of RAM and a single 1660 MHz processor, so it's 
definitely a server class machine!  ;-)

Mike