What's wrong with the tablets and netbooks and laptop that you have--what do you want out of your new machine that you can't get out of those? That will help guide suggestions.

The laptops I have are old and heavy. The netbooks are cool but the screens and keyboards are too small for regular use. The tablets are okay but they have several problems: It irritates me that they can't stand up on their own - if I have to carry around a separate stand, that defeats the idea of portability, to me. I don't like that the screen is exposed; a protective sleeve is again just something else to carry around. The virtual keyboard is easy enough to use but still hard to type on when the screen is vertical. Mine are a Touchpad I got in HP's firesale, and an Acer. They just don't seem to *work* very well. The problems are probably fixable, but I'm not invested enough in the machines to want to invest the time to figure it out.

So. I want a laptop, for the horizontal keyboard and vertical screen, at least a 13-inch screen, light enough to carry in a totebag without giving myself a backache, with enough battery life to last a day (or a cross-country flight) of watching movies or Websurfing. I don't want it to be stuffed with apps that I have to keep that I don't want; I don't want to be managing the machine's function. I'm used to the PC platform, and I need something that's simple to use; a steep learning curve will result in me throwing it under the couch and forgetting about it. Price, under $1000.

Any advice is appreciated!

I have no notion why Touchpad charging might go awry. I was gone from Palm/HP for a while before they started work on that.

Zenkitty,

I'm a Toshiba fan, so here are a couple ideas:

Do you recall that you gave me a demo of your new netbook at the Providence F2F? That showed me that I prefer a larger keyboard, so when I bought a travel laptop for my trip to Europe that August, I bought a 13" Toshiba. This is the current version of that model. Mine is still going strong, and I like it a lot.

Here is something similar.

dcp, yes! I've come to agree with you that it's too small. I need it for travel too; I'm planning on taking it to the UK this fall. Thanks for the recs! I like Toshiba too, that was on my short list already. How heavy are they?

Mine is 3.2 lbs. The ones I linked to above are a little larger, and weigh about 4.3 lbs.

I adore my 11" MacBook Air, but that only really works if you're a Mac person.

I also adore my 11" MacBook Air, and it is my first Mac.

Stop tempting me to the Dark Side!

I fear it wouldn't be compatible with all the stuff I have on the PC platform that I'd be moving over. And by "not compatible" I mean, I couldn't easily figure it out. I'm going for a shallow learning curve, here. Like, flat.

Okay--my NAS does not like Lion.

I'm trying to save a document in Elements, and I navigate to a folder full of symlinks to other folders on the NAS. Can't navigate past them. I doubleclick on "venus" and it replaces the filename with "venus", and doesn't resolve the symbolic link. Who am I supposed to be pissed at here--Apple, or Seagate? (Hell, or Adobe--I can navigate this way in Finder, after all)

Seagate's NAS is no longer compatible with Time Machine, which is why I ask. I am mad at them about that--my firmware is up to date, and everything. It's a kind of useless lump of spinning silicon at the moment.

I have a Seagate NAS that broke Time Machine, but they did release a firmware update that fired it.