A varied assortment of Netbook news and utilities today.

First of all, let’s kick off with the oft-mentioned absence of the CD/DVD drive in Netbook. You can, of course, buy an external drive at about £40/£50, but when you’ve only paid about £250 for your Netbook, it can seem a steep investment.

If you’ve got a PC at home with a drive, however, you can put your Netbook on the same network and use it. I came across the instructions on a forum – pretty obvious now, but it hadn’t occurred to me to do this.

Next up, something for the Acer Aspire One owners. Kuki is a Linux build specifically for this machine. I’ve put it on a USB key, using UNetbootin, and it’s quite good, with everything seemingly working as it should do. However, I’m assuming that this “live” version probably expects to be working from a CD and, hence, appears to be “read only” – configuration changes aren’t being saved. You’d need to install to unlock its full potential – my plan is to use the Storage Expansion SD card slot and install it directly onto an SDHC card.

Definitely worth checking out.

Lastly, the award-winning Samsung NC10 is available from eBuyer for £268.79 (including free P&P). This has been on sale elsewhere recently at a cheaper price but, and crucially, these have turned out to be 3-cell battery versions, rather than the standard 7.5 hour 6 cell version.

Ben Betts, “core” member of the HT2 E-learning company, has done what many of us either do or think about doing. On his company blog he had a rant about his water cooler company, Powwow water.

His experience with their “customer service” is appalling but Powwow have been, erm, reluctant to talk to him about it.

After a large number of comments to his post, he did hear from them. Or rather the companies lawyer. Nice.

Anyway, his response has been a master-class to us all – in particular bloggers such as myself – on how to defend yourself in this situation.

It’s not over and I’m sure there will be follow-ups. I just hope it goes well for Ben.