Spent most of the day run­ning around with my dad look­ing for net­books retail. Best Buy has the Asus eee 1000HD and the MSI Wind, both run­ning XP, along with the older 7″ Linux-​based eee.

The eee 1000HD is actu­ally pretty impres­sive, and would be a con­tender if it weren’t sad­dled with a last gen Celeron M proces­sor. Granted, my trusty HP Mini-​Note runs on a Via C7-​M, so who am I to crit­i­cize, really. Keyboard’s nice, though.

The MSI Wind, on the other hand… I can see why this seems to be the run­away suc­cess of the net­book set. It’s nearly inden­ti­cal in size to my HP, with a com­fort­able key­board, a spiffy Atom proces­sor and even one more USB port than I have on my HP. It’s impres­sive, and upgrade­able to the capa­bil­i­ties of a “real” lap­top, given that Josh just upgraded his to 2GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200rpm hard drive.

There’s a rea­son this is the only seg­ment of the PC mar­ket that’s actu­ally grow­ing. Should be inter­est­ing to see what Microsoft has to say at PDC this week about how Win­dows 7 will run on lower-​power PCs.