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A 200kg fat man can drive a bus just fine ;)

On Emacs ... you still have to pay attention to the loaded extensions, and if you've got dozens of them (especially the Jdee extension, with all the dependencies) it can be as bloated as a full IDE (and it shows in startup times).

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As a side note, you could run Emacs in daemon mode and connect to it with the client. See http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/02/emacs-daemon.html for more details. This way you only have to pay the startup cost once.

Emacs runs comfortably on my netbook. I seriously doubt Visual Studio 2005 would be able to do it.

I've ran VS 2008 on my almost-six-year-old laptop (P-M Banias 1.4 GHz, 1 GB DDR 333, 80 GB 5400 rpm) and I would not hesitate to call the experience "comfortable". What are the specs on your netbook -- is it really that much worse?

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