I picked up a Benq S6 MID PC for $200 (here in Taiwan, in the states Best Buy used to have it for only $150, not sure if it's still available or not). The S6 is a 5" LCD pen input MID PC (no keyboard) that weighs just under a pound, and includes an 800Mhz Atom processor, 512MB RAM, Windows XP, 8GB SSD, Intel GMA500 chipset.

The newest Flash beta, 10.1, supports hardware acceleration for the GMA500, and I'm happy to say that Skritter actually runs pretty quickly on the S6 with the new Beta!

Here's a youtube video I shot with my iphone to show a quick demo of how the site runs on the S6:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VgVAtgO6Q0

For the most part I can write as quickly as I can, although the framerate isn't always 100% smooth. As you can see, the glow effect at the end of drawing a character always causes a stutter as well - that's probably the major annoyance I can think of, and it would be great to have an option to turn this off. But for $200 I'm certainly not going to complain - I came this close to spending $800 on a used Wacom Cintiq tablet to hook up to my Mac.

If you wanted to step up to something a bit faster, for $500 you can pick up a Viliv S5 with a 1.33Ghz Atom processor (and everything else pretty much the same) that should improve speeds. But to me the extra $300 isn't worth it.

drvelocity, just curious: What list or textbook are you working from? That's some nice vocab you got there :-)

Not bad! More expensive than a cheap wacom tablet attached to a laptop, but pretty funky nonetheless.

That's pretty impressive drvelocity, we haven't seen the performance of Skritter on mobile 10.1 yet, so it's pretty informative to see. I did notice some lag, but the fact that it's running anywhere near normal speed is terribly impressive to me.

Here's a video that we took of 2Shanghai using his incredible Tablet PC on Skritter. Not really a budget platform by any stretch, but it is super-sweet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgjRvbYy21Q

Just out of curiosity, why were you interested in the Cintiq of all Wacoms? Do you spend a lot of time in Photoshop/drawing? I'd love a Cintiq but couldn't justify the purchase unless I was doing web design or illustrating full time. I just have a little $50 Wacom Bamboo, which works tolerably well for my purposes.

Nice video george / 2shanghai. Would be good to have one slightly longer with less moving about to really see the effect.

Maybe one for Nick when he comes back, but my laptop does seem to miss strokes if I write too quickly on my cheapo Bamboo. It's a bit annoying, and a "low animation" mode would be nice to keep things moving.

Murrayjames - those vocab words comes from the comic Naruto #5 (火影忍者), my latest preferred method for studying haha. I basically mark the words I can't read and input them into Skritter later, then after getting the words down I go back and read the comic again.

George, yup it's absolutely usable - for the bang for the buck, just incredible. Although.. after seeing that Tablet PC go to work.. I think I have stylus envy.. hehe. I was interested in the Cintiq simply because I want to draw on an LCD, rather than have the disconnect between where I'm writing and what pops up on screen. I'd rather get an EEE PC T91 for $500 though if I wanted to go that route. (Which, BTW, is another great option for Skritter as it too has a GMA500 Chipset and a much faster 1.33ghz Atom!)

ximeng: check your bamboo settings. Eg, disable flicks. Also use a fast javascript browser like Chrome or the new Opera.

My bamboo used to miss them, but with a bit of jiggery pokery it's now great.

Thanks for the tip Byzanti, I had flicks on but don't use them, so they're off. I'm already on Chrome.

It's not the animations that make things slow, for the most part--it's the logic to built prompts, submit reviews, grade things, and move the mouse around. The animations are just where you can most easily see performance drops. I posted some other performance tips on this thread:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=27430817