I had a netbook that I was planning to do wearable computing experiments with and the first thing I noticed was that the HDD would shut down if I had it in a backpack and moved faster than a slow walk.
The combination of moving from Win 7 starter to Win 8 (meaning remote desktop and all the goodies get unlocked) and going to an SSD has made it a really awesome machine. Win 8 really does get a lot out of an SSD, but if you hamstring your machine with an HDD or a "Hybrid" Hard Drive it doesn't matter how fast your CPU is if I/O makes the machine go out to lunch.
I have a netbook that has outlasted two macbooks. 1GB RAM, 1.6 GHz Atom processor, but it has an SSD... and I think the latter has proved to be the most important feature.
The combination of moving from Win 7 starter to Win 8 (meaning remote desktop and all the goodies get unlocked) and going to an SSD has made it a really awesome machine. Win 8 really does get a lot out of an SSD, but if you hamstring your machine with an HDD or a "Hybrid" Hard Drive it doesn't matter how fast your CPU is if I/O makes the machine go out to lunch.