Simon Royal wrote:

First of all, does anyone have any recommendations as to which netbook to look at? Does anyone have one for sale? I don't really want anything with a 7" screen.

I need one to run Ubuntu 9.10. My current Samsung is a 1.1Ghz Duron, so something with a little more oomph would be nice, although Ubuntu runs very smoothly on it with 1GB RAM.

To be honest all the Atom based netbooks (with the exception of the very latest "Pinetrail" machines launched this year) are based on the same chipset and should all work equally well, so just get one that has the screen/keyboard combination you like. The only thing you have to watch is different wireless chipsets but I think all the popular models are covered now and should work pretty much out of the box...a ubuntuforums search for the specific models you are looking at should resolve any doubts.

The Pinetrail machines need a few little fixes for smallish issues, but certainly there are fixes for pretty much everything now.

I am not sure how the atom is going to compare to your Duron, it lacks out of order execution which does seem to cause bottlenecking (I've noticed it on high I/O loads), that said my Acer Aspire One is running with the default 512MB of Ram and a slow SSD. My nvidia ION based Atom media PC is better, but still not overly fast when it comes to doing something alongside a busy disk.

Beyond that I am afraid you have little choice, there is nothing faster offered in the low cost netbook ranges so you'd be up to subnotebooks which get expensive. If you go for a pinetrail machine then they are dual core which should mitigate some of the stalls you get with no OoOE. I'd say that a stock Atom 200 based machine is going to be either the same speed or only slightly faster than your Samsung (it's a hard thing to predict, it probably depends a lot on the workload, it is going to be faster in some areas, like the memory bus, but overall it won't be faster clock for clock)