I ended up rolling back to XP on my Acer Aspire One.  The boot time was annoyingly slow, and overall the machine felt sluggish.  I made some attempts to minimize the strain by adjusting visual effects for best performance, but that did not make an appreciable difference.  None of this was unexpected.  XP is snappier with a much faster boot and more responsive operation on the whole. 

One issue that I have noticed is painfully slow wireless connectivity.  I fixed this by going into the Device Manager and opening the properties dialog for the Atheros Wireless Network Adapter.  On the Advanced tab I clicked on Power Save Mode and set the Value to "Off".  This lets the wireless connection have its fill of power while running on battery.  As I'm sure you can guess, the downside is that it does in fact use more battery power. 

I received my Acer Aspire One (AAO) this weekend.  As I mentioned before, the first order of business was to reload the operating system.  Loading the OS on this class of device - netbook - requires the use of a USB flash drive if you don't have access to an external CD drive.  You can find a tool called USB_MultiBoot_10 at boot-land.net.  That is the tool referenced in the how-to video I found on YouTube.  Even though I wanted to use Vista, I ran through the process as shown in the video for an XP install to familiarize myself with the procedure.  I made it through without any problems using a 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager.  Next I moved to Vista.  The USB Mulitboot tool allows this as well.  The setup is not as straightforward as XP steps without a video as a guide, but I found this post that made the process clearer.  The steps are laid out in the Aug 30 2008, 11:54 PM post by user 'wimb'.

Drivers

This table shows the drivers you'll need for the AAO:

All the XP drivers can be downloaded from the support section of the Acer site.  As shown above, the Vista drivers are included for the sound card and chipset.  The others worked anyway except for the network, both NIC and WiFi.  I found this post that showed where the Atheros WiFi drivers could be found.  The downloads were slow, but worked.  As the post says, after installing the drivers in the "Install Vista 6120 1009.zip" use the other download files to update the last errant device in the device manager.  Under XP, the touchpad software adds the ability to scroll vertically and horizontally using the edges of the touchpad.  The software will not install under Vista.  One other note: when installing the video driver I was asked whether to install it even though the currently installed version was newer.  If you encounter the same thing yourself you'll notice the version number of the one from Acer is a higher revision.  I continued with the installation.

All that's left to do now is download several hundred megabytes of updates.

I've been wanting a netbook for use around the house to browse the web and watch television.  My wife and I made the switch to HD this past summer.  Since then we only use the television to watch movies because as bad as standard def looks on HD, what comes out of the VCR is worse.  For the few programs that we do watch - Sarah Conner Chronicles, Life, The Office, and eventually Lost and Battlestar Galactica - we catch them online via Hulu.com.  For that and Netflix a netbook looks to be just the ticket.  Also it will be a lot easier to take to China than a full size machine.

I had been pretty wound up about the Dell Mini during the late summer.  I've had a good experience with Dell for all of my work machines.  However, when I saw the specifications and price points for the Mini, not to mention what they did with the keyboard layout I turned elsewhere.  After more reading and comparisons I settled on an Acer Aspire One.  Yesterday I ordered the XP, 1GB RAM, 160GB drive, 6-cell battery version from Buy.com.  I even managed to hunt down a 5% discount coupon.

The first thing I do with any computer out of the box is reload the OS.  This of course makes sure you've rid of any bloat-ware.  The Aspire One doesn't have a CD drive so the OS install requires the creation of a bootable USB stick.  I found a video on YouTube that does a good job of guiding you through all of the steps.  I'm going to prepare the USB stick while I'm waiting for delivery of the machine.  Drivers for the Aspire One can be found on the support section of the Acer site.  I'm also going to give nLite a try.  nLite allows you to create customized installations of Windows.  According to the documentation you can integrate service packs and hotfixes and prevent the installation of unwanted components as well as integrate drivers.  I've never used it before, but this seems like a good opportunity to give it a try.