I had an Acer Aspire - twice, both times for $300. MS Word 2007 trial version was pre-installed on it. So was McAfee anti-virus software.
The first time, I was traveling. It's wonderful for traveling, because it's very lightweight and fits right into a largish purse.
If you mainly want to get on the web and use Word, it's great. The hard drive is big enough for most software. No, there's no CD/DVD drive, but you can buy an external one or network it to your main computer and install from there, or download from the Internet.
The first one had a bad pixel on its monitor, so I returned it when I got home. Problem was, they'd taken it off the market and I could not get an exchange anywhere. Maybe 8 months later, it showed up again, and I bought it again.
This time I was more aware of its drawbacks. The screen is tiny, so I had to either duck my head down to see it or prop it up on phone books. This meant my hands were up in the air to type on it, which isn't comfortable.
Because the screen is so tiny, the resolution is tiny, too. You can't make the text bigger than a certain size, which is very tiring to my middle-aged eyes.
I finally decided that for another $300, I could have a full-sized laptop. Only, I didn't want Vista, also didn't want the wretched widescreens, so I decided to keep using my desktop and wait for the next version of Windows and hope the manufacturers or style tyrants come to their senses and realize that widescreens are a bad idea for computers. (I don't like them for TVs, either.)