Again, the Asus F102BA gets my vote. shipping now. *** I'm deeply sympathetic to Microsoft's issues with trying to maintain an old operating system that has a well-deserved reputation for being bug- and security-hole-ridden (albeit not as bad as some of its predecessors). At the same time, some of us have a strong preference for machines in the class most recently known as "netbooks" -- screens in the 7 - 9 inch range, maybe stretching to 10 or 10.1, but no larger; weight under 1 Kg including power supply "bricks"; real (as distinct from chicklet, touch/promimity, or onscreen keyboards), long battery life; etc. Because they have tended to be a little underpowered for the fancy graphics and other demands of Windows from Vista forward, my recollection is that those machines were shipping with XP well into 2010 and probably into 2011. So they are not quite as ancient as some of the correspondence implies. More important, there are, as far as I know, no replacements: the Ultrabooks (and the smallest Mac) are larger, heavier, and don't provide the battery life. Windows 7 and 8 (even Win 7 Starter) simply won't run acceptably on that range of machines. So it isn't just the embedded machines... or being too cheap to buy a Win 7 (or 8) laptop. john