gli16v

I have the Asus 1005ha as well. I can get 9 hours out of a charge with no problem. I am running ubuntu on mine and it works well with the Alfa wireless card. As for video playback though I find it is very choppy even youtube videos so I am not sure how it will handle DVD playback.

If you want a way to get almost unlimited legal copies of Microsoft products for your own use, you can get a TechNet Subscription. It costs around $250.00 but you get license keys for most Microsoft products plus an Enterprise key for Windows 7. It also makes it easy to get clean ISO images as well.

You could try FreeNAS for the networked storage machine, it should run great on your P4 machine. I am not sure how you could stream video from it to your PS3 as I have never owned one. It would take care of the shared media issue.

It doesn't say on the site what wireless chipset it uses just that it's 802.11 b/g how helpful. All the power of a PDA form 1999 ;)

After watching the episode where the Zipit was modified, I saw the Cherrypal Africa $99 laptop online and thought it may be a nice inexpensive device to mod. It has a 400MHz processor, 256MB of RAM and a 7" screen and runs Linux or Windows CE. Here is a link to the product page: Cherrypal Product Page