I used an external CD-ROM USB drive (~$50, ebay) and used any of the multitude of Win XP licenses that I've accumulated over the years (I have about 30% more licenses as computers). I just upgraded the Win XP Home setup. In one netbook I had to reformat the drive and then download the drivers which was more involved, but not that bad.
Another upside of the netbooks is that I use them when I go on vacation, s.a. to London, England where I'll be in a couple of days. The netbook hardly weighs anything, has a long battery life (6 hours), and connects to any WIFI connection available.
If you wish to do speech dictation with DNS, you have to make sure that the CPU is the 1.6GHz and not one of the 900MHz models. You should have at least 1GB Ram memory, but 2GB would be better.
If you want to get REALLY TECHIE COOL, you can turn a netbook into a touch screen for about $80:
Pretty cool, huh?
The shelf life of my netbooks should be no less than that of any of my laptops. They are truly great machines.
