2008 has been the year for netbook madness. Ryan ordered an Acer, my friend John got an Eee PC and now HP is coming out with a new netbook that appears to be quite the offering. The Mini 1000 features a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom CPU, either a 8.9-inch or 10.2-inch display and up to 2GB of RAM. SSD is available in a 16GB drive or you can get a 60GB HDD for more storage. You can, of course, expand your storage via a USB memory stick as well.

As far as the OS goes, you can choose an Ubuntu Linux install that HP is calling the “MIE OS.” MIE stands for Mobile Internet Experience and essentially, it presents you with a bunch of commonly used apps and tasks that looks like an HP TouchSmart PC. Not bad. XP is also available for those looking to go a little more mainstream. The XP version of the Mini 1000 is available today for $399 with 512MB of RAM and an 8GB SSD with the 8.9-inch screen. For $50 more, you can score the 10.2-inch version. Look for the Linux version in early 2009.

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It’s the holiday season and you know what that means: toys! That’s why Toys ‘R’ Us is expanding its tech side by adding Apple iPods and Asus Eee PC netbooks to its inventory. The iPods will be sold within specially designed “iPod boutique” wall displays. iPod Shuffle,  Nano and Touch will all be available come next month, but for how long is anyone’s guess.

The netbooks will be available in Linux and Windows XP versions which are priced at $269 and $299, respectively. Has your kid been bugging you lately for a laptop computer? Netbooks are the affordable solution which provide all the basic necessities of computing without the superb specs. Even better, most kids will never know the difference.

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Here’s something out of left-field that I don’t think anyone except the geniuses at Microsoft expected. In recent tests, it’s been revealed that Internet Explorer 8 uses twice the memory of Firefox. As if that wasn’t enough to blow your mind, get this shit:

In a test involving IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 10 rich media sites were opened in each on a machine running Vista with 2 GB RAM. In the end IE8 sucked up 380MB of memory, IE7 260MB and Firefox accounted for 159MB. You would be surprised to know that when Windows XP starts it takes 130 - 150MB, then start IE8 and suddenly you would be looking at a larger memory print than Windows XP

Yes. Microsoft has managed to make IE8 such a RAM hog, that it takes a significantly more amount of memory to start it than it does to start Windows XP. Is this the nail in the coffin for Internet Explorer? Surely Microsoft will force everyone to upgrade to IE8 and those with older computers will be caught in the dust. Think, Microsoft! Think!

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