A lot of people are picky about computers. It’s gotta be a Mac, or it’s got to run Windows 7, or it’s got to have at least 6GB of RAM, or the motherboard needs to support hardware RAID…

But there are lots of times when all you really care about is having a computer to surf the web and check your e-mail. It doesn’t really matter if it’s running XP or Ubuntu or what, and you don’t care about RAM or disk speed. There’s really a lot of times when this is all you need, and I think there are even people who never need anything more. They’re not going to try to play Counterstrike or use Photoshop to edit high-resolution panoramas and apply complicated filters.

And that’s why things like the Lenovo IdeaCenter C300 or even the Acer AspireRevo are so cool in my book. Both will work fine for basic usage. Surf the web, check your e-mail, or even watch TV on Hulu. And they’re only a few hundred bucks.