I m a bit short of money and cant afford a laptop right now

I have an Old PC with the following specs:
Intel Celeron 2.0 Gz
256 Mb RAM (older type, not DDR2)

I am able to use gimp and inkscape just satisfactorily (though slow when doing complex tasks). I think the slow speed is due to less RAM.

Will I be able to use gimp and inkscape at at least this level on a $300-400 netbook?

I do not use them heavily but they are necessary for my work. i usually work with image size <=1024x768 in gimp, so its pretty light. inkscape is fast sometimes and sometimes slow, cant pinpoint the cause.

I would be happy with a low powered machine if i suits my needs, but just need to know that it is not underpowered.

Those netbooks in general are a good option! I have an EEE-PC 1000HA and it is excellent and cheap!

I bought a refurbished Acer Aspire One 512mb ram 8Gb SSD for £130 (with 12 month warranty) here in the UK (that's about US$150). I'm dual-booting Linpus (which came installed) and sidux www.sidux.com and using the xfce desktop. I've used gimp on it to crop photos from my camera and it's fine. But the screen is pretty small -- only 9 inches. I'm sure you could pick one up for the same price in India. But the poster above ^ has a machine with a bigger screen, and would be better for photo editing.

These low-end netbooks are great value but they are really only for doing short periods of work on them. If you plug a usb mouse in it's an improvement (same with any laptop). But you could even plug a bigger monitor into them as most come with a monitor output.

I find the speed fine with xfce. Bit slower with KDE. Haven't tried Gnome. Linpus is ok but sidux is better.

What's the weather like in Pubjab. It's raining in London :-(

Bin

I think it would be a more economical solution to add more RAM to your existing laptop. I am going to take and assume that your laptop uses DDR RAM, which would be cheaper to put > 1GB into it. Also, is your processor based on a Pentium 4 or a Pentium M (it would probably say Celeron M if it is)?

My PC is not a laptop. i want to buy a note/netbook.

I do not wish to be misled by advertisements, as i just want a machine sufficiently
powered for my usage, not bleeding edge CPU and RAM monsters

low power netbook is fine for me as long is it atleast as powerful as my current pc.

Any suggestions on whether to go for SSD or HD?

SSD is still quite expensive. I would go for HDD, my netbook works pretty fine with HDD and I have 160GB, while netbooks with SSD you would find for about 20GB or more, but then it would be damn expensive.

for the same amount or sometimes even less you can find a mainstream 15inch laptop thats more powerful than the netbooks if you look around.. All the netbooks are good for is their size (small screens)

check out HP's and such.

You are right.

256MB RAM is just not enough for modern desktops. So linux uses swap which is s-l-o-w.

Your CPU is fine (Mine is only 1GHz), but I have 1GB RAM, and I am very happy with the snappy performance.

So, throw out your old RAM and put in 1GB. You'll be surprised
Much cheaper than buying a new PC.

Having 512MB or even 1GB RAM is not a RAM monster. This causes your page file (swap partition) to be used less. Otherwise, it is like turning pages in a book unnecessarily when you don't know what you are looking for. It's just busy work. The A110 has 512MB RAM and runs at 1.6GHz. The webcam does not flicker - good indication of speed. Linux is also less cluttered than Windows, so should be faster. Gimp is available in Linux. Check specifications before you buy, the A120/150 models may have higher capabilities for a little extra in cost. Do not over-buy, but buy as big as you can - so that you may use it longer before re-investing again. Computers have the habit of trapping you into trying something new every day. Go Linux since the software updates are seamless. Also check availability of peripherals that work with Linux.