[easyThrowaway]

I literally recorded an album using Ableton Live 8 (or 9?) and a bunch of synth VSTs on an Acer One netbook, with an AMD C-50 CPU and 4GB of RAM and a 128GB ssd internal drive.

It had amazing performance for its size at the time...that is, until the absolutely underpowered fan was unable to cool it down and it would inevitably shut down. Or the battery would die after just half an hour of usage.

Once it melted, I tested a few atom-based netbooks and general performance was abysmal, mostly due to the 5400rpm hard drive they almost universally sported at the time.

Moved to a polycarbonate 2010 macbook. Of course, it was four time the price of the aforementioned Acer netbook. But that thing is still trucking to this day, still retaining nearly 80% of the original battery charge.