10.1" refurb'd Dell netbook arrived yesterday (4/27)

Actually, it was listed as a 'scratch and dent', but it was neither scratched nor dented in the least.  There was some crud that I scraped off, and the netbook looked sweet.  Dell Outlet was having a spring clearance with 20% off most items; 25% off on Alienware stuff, too.  I took the opportunity to get myself a Dell Mini Inspiron 10-1012 (which I have to say, is quite neat) for just $215.20.  It includes a 6-cell battery with an Atom N450 CPU, so the life of the netbook is quite long (6~10 hours).  Took me some time because I haven't gotten a wireless setup going on at home, but I spotted a sweet wireless router with a usb port (for print sharing or external hard drive sharing), and will pick one up today (4/28).

Anyhoo, I had been spending a lot of time getting some stuff loaded onto it and installed, and just getting oriented with Windows7 Starter.  There is one very disconcerting drawback - if anyone has played with it - that it is extremely difficult to change the wallpaper, and it only applies for the Starter version of Windows7.  Fortunately, after much searching, it appears that I have finally found the solution by this programmer who's got a very small and simple registry editor and program that makes it very simple to add wallpapers.  It's called, "Starter background changer", and you can find it here.  Works like a charm, though I haven't rebooted to see if the registry changes are permanent or if Windows has extra tricks up its sleeve.  AFAIK, it works perfectly.  You can manually make the registry changes if you want to, but why bother?

Oh, and it turns out, you can run Sketch Up on this netbook.  I figured it would, because the NM10 express chipset contains the 3150 Intel graphics chipset, and that chipset supports OpenGL 1.5, the minimum standard for using SU7.  Just need to get a portable-size mouse to go along with the router, already have an external hard drive ready to be loaded with all sorts of stuff, and I'll be networked and speeding along.