I just bought a netbook!
It is meant to be used by my daughter when she enters her next class in August, but I’m not sure if it will be available then (I might need it as my mobile connection to the world). We used it last weekend on a trip to Hamburg as mobile internet station. Thanks to a WiFi hotspot in the camp site I avoided to use a borrowed UMTS stick.
We are thrilled! The light device is much easier to take with you than a regular notebook but equally useful on tour. I wouldn’t want to develop on this machine but as a surf staton it’s phenomenal compared to my mobile phone.
I selected the Lenovo Ideapad S10e for price/features. I installed Windows 7 RC on a 150GB HD and it runs very smooth even with only 512MB (- shared video memory). But the memory upgrade is ordered already anyway.
The Windows 7 installation was from a 4GB USB stick I prepared from the DVD ISO image. That was a very simple task (see hints in Daniel Melanchton’s blog, in german).
The W7 performance index is 1.0 only due to the 3D graphics performance but the Intel GMA driver is bad and hopefully fixed soon. Windows Update offered to install a newer driver version and I agreed. That was a fault! After the next reboot the cursor was replaced by a big random bitmap of maybe 100×100 pixels. I had to revert to the last driver version to get my cursor back!
All other devices work fine, even ACPI is OK!
Update: An english language description of preparing a bootable USB stick for Windows 7 setup is now available here.