I spent AU$600 on a Windows 8 small laptop exactly 12 months ago. I think it's 2Gb of RAM. It feels cheap, the trackpad has issues and it is just slow enough to make you say "I wish it were faster". Oddly, I happened to discover that it's one of Asus' most reliable laptops.

The mail thing is interesting. I tried pointing Windows Mail to my IMAP server which sits on an EC2 instance. It's got 25,000+ messages in Inbox and it just doesn't cope with that. I point Opera Mail at it and it slurps it all up easily. Maybe it just doesn't like IMAP all that well.

Wade.