It's nice to see someone who actually gets it. Yes, SSD is epxensive, but not when you compare it to the price you'd pay for a similar number of hard drives that can match the IOPs performance

It's just a bug in the way that W7 interacts with XP graphics drivers. It's been discussed in the private beta groups, an d a fix will be in the next build that the private beta testers get.

The freeze issue with video playback is a known problem if you are using old XP video drivers with W7.

Just ran windirstat on a fresh install of the x4 version on an Intel system. The actual OS files are less than 11 GB, of which more than 50% by size are in the winsxs folder which could take some real serious pruning (full of AMD64 files which are not used on a Intel EMT64 CPU amongst other things.) Another GB is for WoW64 files that wouldn't be installed on a 32-bit netbook. These files are also somewhat larger than the released code (my guess) because of debug code.

So a combination of a little more customization of the install on Netbooks along with code shrinkage as debug gets taken out, and I could easily see the basic install being shrunk to 5GB or less. Combine that with increased SSD capacity and it looks quite feasible as a Netbook platform.

They've dropped the 2.5m limit, anybody can download for the next two weeks. See: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/01/10/here-s-where-we-stand.aspx

Writing drivers doesn't, and never has required access to the source code of the OS. So since that part of your story is bollocks, it doesn't augur well for the rest.

I've run my systems on UPS for about the last 15 years, so it's hard to say for sure. However, when I've been at my PC and the UPS has switched, I've noticed lights flicker or go out momentarily, so my guess is that the interruption in those cases would have been sufficient to bring the system down.

Frequency of power failure is going to depend a lot on where you are. According to the logging software on my UPS, it has switched to battery 38 times in the last 24 weeks, so it has saved my system an average of 1.5+ times/week. The UPS cost me about $100 bucks, so it seems like a pretty solid investment!