PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW WHAT I THINK about this Asus 10″ notebook PC. I haven’t used one, but at $423 for an Atom-powered machine with XP, a bigger screen and keyboard than my quite-nice 9″ Asus, a 160GB hard drive and 7-hour battery life, it sounds good. I like my 9″ Asus XP machine a lot, but it’s not nearly as capable as this one and it cost nearly as much.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Feola emails:

Suggest you check out the new Asus netbooks from their notebook division, notably the N10 for an extra $6.

What you get is pretty much a 12-inch chassis notebook with a great keyboard, a terrific 10-inch screen and plenty of storage. I went whole hog and bought the loaded one: High-end nVidia graphics that can be switched off to save battery life; tons of cool stuff like the ability to log in via fingerprint and facial recognition; and the strangely speedy Windows Vista Business, which appears much better behaved than the Home variants. In effect, you end up with a terrific looking, tiny, highly capable ultra light laptop that runs forever on battery for about a third the price of the MacBook Air or those little Sony Vaios, with the tradeoff being the Intel Atom processor rather than a Core Duo. It’s good enough to be your primary machine as long as you’re not, say, processing video. (It runs Gears of War. No, seriously. Here it is running Crysis.) Recommended.

Thanks again for a fascinating site.

Thanks for your interesting email, Chris!