Simple net book

My mum might have to go to New Zeland in the summer for the arrival of her 1st grandchild
In her words she wants 'a little laptop that she can surf the interenet, get her emails and store and upload her many fotos onto'
She is wanting something v cheep - under £100 - she is fairly computer savvy but dosent want anything too fancy as she has plenty of stuff at home - including a pretty decent but heavy laptop

The origional of the genre, the Asus EEEPC. I'd (Obviously!) recommend going for a Linux model as you don't have to then worry about the additional overhead of running anti virus on a low specced machine. You know it makes sense!

i know, i just have no experience of linux so i am scared of it what differences will there be?

My understanding is that the eee-pc is a very much simplified interface, so it's all clicking on tabs to get to different groups of apps. i.e. hopefully very intuitive.

Here's an old tutorial on how to get the option of the full blown experience rather than just the simplified basic tasks options provided out of the box. Also as you've paid £0 for the operating system and there are no licencing issues if you don't like the stock environment, you an replace it with something like one of these. The world is your lobster!

I found this in Maplin - it's in your price range but not sure if the spec is adequate.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=257308

We just got April one of these for her Christmas. It originally had Linux on it but my OH put Win 7 onto it. It works nicely and she loves it. Works really fast too.

We got it from morgancomputers.co.uk. It's a little over your budget but still very good prices.

I'd recommend sticking with Linux as your operating system: it's less memory intensive than Windows before you even take into account the antivirus.

My husband has the original eeePC, and it's a good little machine. The later ones have a better screen, though. However, the operating system they supply was not great, and I'd recommend installing something else, preferably Ubuntu Linux. My Dell netbook came with a chopped-down version of Ubuntu, but both OH and I have now installed plain Ubuntu, and it's fantastic.

All the software your mum will need is free and good. I've even used this for preparing talks for work, and haven't had any problems at all interfacing between Microsoft office and Open Office.

ETA: the cheaper netbooks have solid state drives, which are robust, but more limiting of storage. If your mum wants to store lots of photos, she should consider external memory. My Dell laptop has a built-in SD card slot, which is ideal: I store photos and music on SD cards. Otherwise, a big old usb drive would do the job nicely.

I got a Linux Eee PC for Christmas. Perhaps my needs don't fit it, but I have been very disappointed in it. I am in the process of dumping the original OS and installing Debian the same as on my desktop.

For others view, see http://www.geteasypeasy.com/

Thanks everyone, lots to look at!

Note! I wasted hours last night attempting to write the installer for a new OS to the SD card that came with mine and boot from it. When I pulled the card out, it wasn't a card, just a plastic spacer.