Ultra-portable Laptop Shopping ... Need Help

[iSDK]

I need some help looking for an ultra portable laptop.

Wife killed off our Eee 701 a month ago, and now i'm back in the market for another ultra portable. Thanks to the economy being what it is... we don't have exorbitant funds to throw around but she needs another one.

- I've got 300-500 to spend. REALLY really really rather not go over 425.
- 8in screen size at least, the Eee was a little small, too small for page width. so a bit bigger would be somewhat nice.
- Since she loves WoW, ability to play even on lowest of low settings would be great.

We have the MacPro for all our intensive stuff, as well as few external DVD drives running around here so yea, installing stuff won't be an issue.

I've heard of the HP Mini 1000 XP
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/store_access.do?template_type=series_detail&category=notebooks&series_name=mini1000xp_series

YouTube says it can run WoW... and the price at 300 is pretty much perfect.
Just want to know if there are some better options out there.

Thanks much,
~Your favorite person ever

[Kiwi]

It's hard to recommend many of the small laptops other than the Eee PCs, because of how unreliable they are. At my old job, when we first started selling these smaller laptops, more than 2/3 of them came back due to problems like the batteries dying and the main board overheating (which in some cases, warped the shape of either the screen or the keyboard).

My friend has one of the HP mini-laptops, which seems to work pretty well. The only thing that drags the performance down is that it has Windows Vista on it, but it is possible to install a mini version of XP on these things without too many problems.

Sorry I couldn't really recommend any, it's just the experience I've had with a lot of them.