Penny: all good advice you have received. But I urge you to do more. Make sure you can see working both notebooks and netbooks at somewhere like John Lewis. Look at the screens and see if the salesman can display something useful such as a screen full of text. Depending upon your age and general visual acuity, you might find a netbook screen a bit small. Many people with good vision do not find it small, of course. Stay with the screen at a good shop for enough time to make sure you do not feel eye strain. Ask the salesman about touch sensitive screens. If you decline such a screen (it's not needed at present for FH), make sure you do so for the right reasons such as it is not necessary for you. Ask about battery life - no point in buying anything portable if the battery will run out of charge when you are away from home. A program such as FH might well make a good number of disc accesses when in use (depends just what you are doing) and hard disc activity will run down the battery faster than say simple web browsing. Programs such as FH have displays that extend beyond normal sized screens and it's necessary to scroll vertically and horizontally to see all - the larger the screen the less the scrolling. One of our number recommended buying an external hard disc for a netbook. Yes do get one and even if you buy a larger notebook. You must back up your system on a regular basis. Never, ever, back up to the same hard drive that's in the laptop or PC. An external HD will set you back a mere £50 or so, an insignificant cost compared with the cost of losing your work. I think one of our number pointed out that netbooks won't have an optical drive (a DVD reader/writer) in their tiny cases so you will need to buy one. Oh, if you do go the netbook route, make sure it uses Windows 7. People do run programs such as FH under an emulator that allows an Apple laptop to run Windows applications, but this is a complication you might want to avoid. Unless you know someone with an Apple who can run Windows who could demonstrate it to you. Ian