Well A+ certification isn't going to get you far, you'll also need to be MCSE certified if you want a decent paying job. Your best bet is a full blown laptop so that you can put dual boot operating systems on it such as Linux and M$. Also you can usually find 0% interest financing at such places as Best Buy or Circuit City; makes buying a laptop pretty easy when monthly payments are $25.

Lastly, I don't know your situation, but at 26 years old you need to get on the ball here and the balls you need are not for buying a computer. The technology industry is a very competitive industry that looks for talented hard working people. Maybe you fell on some hard times that required to live at home, but at the same time I can't blame your parents for looking for rent money. Along with getting certifications I hope you are involved in a technical school as well.

I am looking for a stepping stone and I figured A+ was a good starting point. Yes, I will be going to a technical school as well. MCSE would be my next step. We all have to start somewhere.

Thanks for the advice on the laptop option. It seems that would a better choice for my needs. However, People have always told me never to buy a laptop from a big box retailer. But that seems like the most economical option.

That screen is just too tiny to do anything seriously productive on. I mean light editing or surfing might be alright, but there simply isn't a replacement for screen real-estate. Not to mention the abysmal battery life. On the "mobile device continuum" it's more powerful than an n800/810 but not as powerful as even a budget laptop. If you compare mobile devices to golf clubs, with the mobile phone as a putter, and a desktop replacement laptop as a driver, the eee is a 54 degree wedge. It's certainly useful, but if you have to drop one thing from your bag when you travel, that's the first thing I'd get rid of, given that I had an n800 and a laptop.

This is a off topic to this forum, but I think i'ts worth it...

IMHO your mistaking the ability to "talk along" with real knowledge, DDR13/pentuim31 whatever is not relevant. like said, the PC form factor is not changed for ages.... and companies will not pay you because you're able to talk along wich Nvidea chipset is the "best" .
Unless you have a compelling reason to work mobile forget the laptop.
If you're serious to get into "IT" (and not in showing off doom8 benchmark results) I suggest to get (for the same money as a entry level portable) a cheap big tower, a rock stable motherbord and a entry level AMD/INTEL cpu (no not a via C7), a cluncky but dirt cheap *big* CRT screen and 2 gig ram (or more for a 64 biy host - but 2 gig is a start) and lots and lots of hdd space.
Install windows or linux and then download vmware server (it's free) and then start playing around.
It will allow you to play with your own full blown virtual network on your own pc, learning tcp/ip basics like routing and firewalls/packet sniffers.
make vmware images for several clients (different windows versions for example), win domain controllers, web servers on linux, samba sharing, etc,etc...
and then mess things up/play with it.

decide what you want to do/what you like
* OS support? every idiot claims to "know windows" (and imho very few MCE's actually do) it's hard to distinct yourself in that area.
* databases? learn Linux / windows basics first and then get Oracle 11g from their website (or a other RDBMS) and start reading. Knowing a RDBMS like DB2/Oracle/Sqlserver is really good for $$$. trust me on that one.
* webservices? learn Linux / BSD basics first and then hit apache
* networking? try setting up a vmware env with OS/2, dos (yeah really), windows 93/ZP/brista en a few flavors of L/Unix clients and a few win/linux servers ... all the problems will give you lot's of things to discover and learn.
* coding? check your local offer for jobs and see what they ask for the moment - java? C? #? I'm no programmer besides SQL, might ask other input on this one...
* learn what the word "backup" actually means....

buy (or download - but a paper book is much more fun to read) one or 2 reference books ( O'Reilly are good) in the area you're interested in to "bootstrap" , all the rest of the information is free on the net.

you can then even take remote control of your env trough the Nokia how 's that for "portable"?

greetz from a complete self taught IT idiot

Depends on what you mean by productive. I travel a lot and would MUCH rather leave my laptop behind (lord knows I've B&Med enough about traveling with a laptop), yet I can still work quite efficiently on a 7" screen (not an EEE, but a PP3 with a USB keyboard).

Granted, I'm not doing graphics. I'm doing translations in an office suite environment. For me, as long as I have something that's Word/Excel/Powerpoint compatible, I'm productive.

R.
==

I guess it just depends on what line of work you're in, I suppose. I can't imagine doing much graphics work on a 7" screen. Basic editing/word processing might not be too bad. Working on a complex powerpoint, or biggish excel spreadsheet, less so. I also HAVE to have an optical drive when I travel. USB-based media aren't an option. By the time you drag enough peripherals around to make an EEE or tablet PC as powerful as my laptop, you're hauling around just as much crap and it's now all tethered around with messy cables.

It's still a pain to carry a laptop, granted, but ultra mobile devices just aren't there yet. That new lenovo airbook sized thing might be interesting though.

The Eee has replaced both my desktop and my laptop. The screen is plenty big enough for most uses, even for my 60 year-old eyes. It does dual or treble boot as easily as anything else, maybe easier. You can boot whatever you like off the USB or SD ports. Lots of people are installing WinXP on the SSD and booting various Linux distros off sticks or SD cards. The Eee is a full computer, just in a smaller box, which makes it far easier to carry but it's just as productive as anything else. My big HP laptop now makes a fine doorstop, because it's just too big and heavy to carry around, and the Eee will do absolutely anything it will do, and do it faster and longer. If you need optical media, just plug one into the USB port, as well as a terabyte HD if you want. The package will still be lighter and smaller than a huge laptop. You can also plug an external monitor and/or keyboard in and use that if you have to have a bigger screen. Don't slag something you've never seen or used. Your ignorance shows very clearly.

I just said that I don't like carrying around a bunch of kludgy external devices to do things that a laptop can do with what's built-in. See how long the battery lasts when you are running an external HDD and DVD writer off it. I don't want to have to plug a bluetooth dongle into the thing to use my cell phone as a modem. I don't want to be stuck typing on a smaller-than-normal keyboard with keys laid out funky. I don't want to have to squint at a tiny little 7" screen, especially on websites that have complex layouts. And I can't imagine that it's a champ at doing video transcoding and the like, not with 900mhz of processor.

I'm not bashing the EEE, I'm just saying there are a lot of things about it that make it less-than-optimal for me, and how I use computers. If I was hiking across america, I'd make do with using it because of it's form factor. If I'm just toting my laptop from the car to the airplane and to the hotel, I'll live with a backpack and 6 or so lbs of laptop. It's an amazing machine, it's just not right for everyone.

Get a used laptop. A thinkpad R52 or T42 from eBay. They are about the same price as the eee but you get a lot more out of them.

If you want something small, get a X40 or X41.

All these are between 300 to 500 dollars. You might even be able to buy an R50/51/52 for less than 300.

I don't own an Eee, nor have I played with one. I can say, though, as a person interested in getting into IT or programming, the Eee is a really bad choice. Yes it's a computer, and it's cool in its own right, but it's not made to be a replacement for a desktop or laptop, instead it's geared as more of an "on the go" system. That alone should be enough to make you pick a budget laptop over an Eee. Plus, the Eee may be fast enough to do what most people want to do, but a budget laptop will be much faster and will therefore likely make for a better "every day" computer, not a travel companion. Plus, the screen resolution is the same as the N800/N810, it's just a bigger screen. You already have the portable computing angle covered with the N800, now you need a real computer.

If you're not hooked on the portable, whet polossatik said is absolutely brilliant. Build (don't buy) a desktop. You learn quite a bit from researching components and putting it all together, and in the end you'll spend less and get more than if you built a laptop. His/her suggestion about VMWare is also brilliant; the best way to learn anything is to do it. If you chose Linux as your main OS, you could also use VirtualBox for a lot of your needs (an OSS alternative to VMWare). Virtual environments aren't quite the real thing, but they are a great learning tool. You could probably do the same with a laptop that's slightly better than budget, but building your own system definitely has a lot of merit; again, if you can deal with your machine not being portable. That's my 2 cents I guess.

As an aside, why does every topic involving the Eee have to degrade into a debate about the Eee vs a budget laptop? The guy asked a simple question, why can't anyone give him a simple answer? The Eee has its place, and it fits the need of some people very well, others not so much, and still others not at all. Fanboy vs. anti-fanboy helps nobody....