My aspire one runs visual studio 2008 fine. The only question is why would you want it to? Seriously, have you ever coded on a resolution that small before? It's like torture. I even plugged a second monitor into it and it still killed me inside a little.

I eventually decided to play to its strengths. Netbooks are good at being useless, so I installed OSX on it to further magnify that aspect.

10w is no 4w. If you're carrying around a netbook as a wearable computer, and ignoring power drain from everything except the processor, the one with the atom is going to last more than twice as long on the same battery. That's the difference between wearable computing for 4 hours and for the whole day.

While the UL30A’s eight-cell battery didn’t quite reach the advertised 12 hours of runtime when we ran the LAPTOP Battery Test (continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi), it still impressed. At 9 hours and 55 minutes, this ultraportable’s runtime is more than double the category average (4:57), and is one of the longest-lasting notebooks we’ve ever tested. Even the Toshiba mini NB205 netbook lasted 31 minutes less. With battery life this long, the UL30A should power through a full day, or even a transcontinental flight.

Well, my school spent $270 to buy it as the core of my thesis, so I didn't lose out too much there. And funny you should mention the screen - since it's a wearable computer, my display is obviating the need for the computer to waste any power on the screen. Less cooling needed for a less-hot processor helps too, so there's not as much extra stuff sucking down battery as you might think.