Your Experience In Video Conference With Netbooks/mini-laptops

Hi,

Looking for your feedback on using your netbooks for video conferencing, ie. quality of video/voice reception on different platforms.

A little bit background for my inquiry. I'm a Mac user and I use Ichat for vdo chats with my parents. I'm going to visit my parents next month and I plan to get a netbook for my Mum to use, whenever she wants. She is more IT challenged than my Dad, I would not want my Dad to blame her if anything happens to the Mac at home.

I did some research regarding cross-platform software, both Skype and Sightspeed, work well between Mac/Wintel PC, with Sightspeed having the edge.

The issue for me is that most netbooks seems to come with some sort of Linux installed, thus only working with Skype. So far I did not have the chance to test vdo chatting between Mac (or even PC) with any netbook on Linux. Does it work well with Skype? Can anyone tell me about your experience so far? While the Linux interface seems to be quite easy for the IT challenged, one alternative would always be to install Win XP on it (to install Sightspeed), although I'm not sure that everything would still be working the same way.

While I'm not an Acer fan, I'm still looking at the Aspireone. Battery life and storage capacity are not so much an issue for me, and it's currently at a sweet price spot of 12.900 baht. I'm sure that within the next few weeks, prices are going down even further, so I might be looking into ASUS 901/1000 or MSI Wind, the reviews on these are quite good.

Anyway, the main point for me is vdo conferencing software and ability, as well as operating system.

Looking forward to your feedback.

Cheers,

Joao