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.