The annoying thing about this and other VIAOs is that is comes pre-installed with an avalanche of useless software whose shortcuts blind the view of the desktop. These programs make the system performance come to a crawl and make the OS unstable.

There is only a restore CD to re-install the same unstable and sloth-like configuration. I managed though to install WinXP Pro on another partition that I created using PartitionMagic, and got substantial performance gains, but at the expense of some features like the camera.

Some might complain about the choice of processor by Sony, but I manage fine for web development (Apache web server, mySQL, Tomcat, Mozilla, DreamWeaver, Flash), shell, WSH, and perl scripting (Cygwin, ActiveState, Komodo), and programming with .Net, C++, and Java (Eclipse, CodeWarrior, jEdit). I also use it to do reports and presentations for college using Office documents with OpenOffice. It's not a speed demon by any means, but without the junk that Sony bundles, the performance is adequate.

You would be much better off buying an Compaq Ipaq or similar Xscale based hand held computer. Software is being written for Xscale computers by the truckloads and it uses less power than the Crusoe. Or go for a PIII-M notebook.

Sadly Transmeta (the company that makes the Crusoe CPU) has failed to make very many of them, and is not expected to last much longer. Hopefully the brilliant ideas they created will live on in a company able to bring them to market in the kind of numbers that make software developers take notice and write stable apps for it.