My perfect new travel companion

— -- I've finally found the perfect companion for my business trips. Traveling with my new companion, I'm more productive than ever before. Everyone is fascinated by its presence, and we quickly become the center of attention on every flight.

The "companion" of which I speak is my new Acer Aspire One "netbook" computer. It has an 8.9" screen, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive, which easily holds all my software and data files, including my entire music and digital photo collections. It came with the Windows XP operating system and a six cell battery that provides five solid hours of work time – enough juice for a transcontinental flight. Best of all, it weighs less than three pounds, is only 10" wide, and 7.5" high and deep when open. That means I can still work comfortably in any airplane, even stuck in a middle seat when the passenger in front slams their seat all the way back.

With 50 installed software programs, including AVG antivirus and the Carbonite automatic file backup service constantly running in the background, the Aspire One is still by far the fastest computer I've ever used. I have already consumed 105GB of hard drive space with over 200,000 files, yet my Acer boots up in less than a minute. Oh, and by the way this little computer is readily available for under $400.

It's no wonder my computer becomes the focus of my fellow passengers on every flight. Everyone wants to know how I like it and how much I paid for it. One flight attendant asked to hold it to compare the weight with her current laptop. At airports, in meetings or just about anywhere, my Acer is a conversation starter. Even on a San Francisco BART rapid transit train I was accosted by a stranger who asked a litany of questions about the Acer's performance and my level of satisfaction with it.

My little Acer is one of a new breed of "netbook" computers which are smaller and lighter than traditional notebook computers and are likely to revolutionize the way business travelers work on the road. Acer is just one of a growing number of netbook producers offering comparable, similarly priced machines. I've recently seen similar netbooks from Asus, Averatec, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo, Q2 Designs, and Toshiba. Some with smaller hard drives are selling for under $300. My Acer netbook uses the speedy new Intel Atom processor, which was designed specifically to power these small computers.