CrystalMethod

That really is odd. Mind you my system did something simmilar with the RC. Completely borked my XP installation, which was on two seperate drives in raid 0. I had previously thought it was something to do with it being the the RC and not the release, but now that you had a simmilar problem, it makes me wonder if it is a problem with Win7 and the Nvidia controller chips.

What's the actual lead time on the Dell's these days?

The Asus netbooks are all linux compatible. Getting the hardware to "work properly" is kind of relative to what you want it to do with it. The hardware is meant to function in a certain way. "Hacking", is getting it to do what you want it to do, rather than what it was designed to do. No easy answer to this one. Just gonna have to tear stuff apart and figue out how it works, then you can put it back together the way you want it to work.

Usually in a case like this, I will image the drive to another via a sector copy before I attempt anything. If the drive does actually have a problem, you want to get as much of that data off of it as you can. If the drive is failing, the less you have it hooked up and spinning, the better. The better your odds on not having to go to extreme measures to recover the data.

I'd run a diag on your HDD first. Might be new, but that doesn't mean it didn't slip through QC. Are you using the RTM Windows 7, or the RC? I'd install another version of Windows, or a Linux distro, and test for stability. Run it for a few days and see if it exibits any of the same problems. One thing I would swap out right away or test (if you have the equipment) is your power supply.

I'm kinda wondering who else has saved bits and pieces, thrown them in a box till they amass enough parts to make a functional system out of them. But, what do you do with an old system? I've tried to donate them to schools, and the donation has been refuse because the hardware was too old and slow. How long should you reasonably keep old harware before it's useless to anyone?

Not really sure what you want it to display, but, from what I've seen, it's a monochrome 2 line LCD display. Garanteed Symantec doesn't manufacture that LCD. It should have some other marking on it that will tell you what it is, and who makes it. After that, it should only take a lilttle more reseach to find out how to make it suit your needs. For basic information a serial port connection should do, USB would be a lot more involved.

The removing the battery trick doesn't always work. There is however the jumper method which most boards have. Some involve moving a jumper and moving it back, other's require placing a jumper on two pins (or shorting two contact points). One thing I found that works on some boards, NOT ALL AND POTENTIALLY RISKY, is to remove the battery, and short the positive and negative terminals of the battery contacts on the board.