My family flew over to the USA to visit my wife's family in October 2011, and I couldn't pass up an opportunity to buy something technological for a lower price than I can get it in South Africa. One of the things I'd been wanting to buy for a long time was a netbook.

With this in mind, I did some searching and some research and decided to buy the Toshiba NB505 from Amazon.com. A number of the reviews on Amazon mentioned using Linux (usually Ubuntu) on the netbook, and they all said that it ran well. With this key piece of information, and a friend's recommendation of a similar model from Toshiba, I decided to save up some money and buy the NB505.