Making a "little" purchase

Not sure if you've kept up on our computer issues over on Wifey's blog but I'll cut to the chase and say that our 'ol Gateway desktop has gone kaput. Well, we thought it had, and we had mentally discarded it for quite a while. Then, one night, Wifey finally got tired of me putting off calling Gateway one last time to find out if they would cover replacing the motherboard (again! This little POC computer had been built using a way-too-small box and the poor fan just couldn't keep up with the heat so the motherboard burnt out a few years back. They covered the replacement but that didn't change the fact that the design was horrible) when she called me out and said something like "if it was the computer you depended on you'd have called by now." Yeah, not my best moment. Anyhow, I got right up and, just for kicks, turned the thing on so I could tell "Jenny from Bombay" just what kind of screen of death we saw when it started up. Guess what??? Thing turned on and has been chugging along just fine ever since.

*Fingers crossed*

As great as this is, we know we're operating on borrowed time. Kind of like the transmission in our van, but that is another story. And the heat pump. And the washer and dryer... excuse me, I have to go cry a little bit now...

Alright, that's good. As I was saying, the Gateway is on borrowed time, in only a matter of days/weeks it will be fried once again, and we're really tired of not having something reliable to work with. Wifey is writing up a storm, and getting noticed for it, and she needs something she can count on. JAM is getting older and, especially with a wannabe geek for a father, should be learning some cooler things on there. We just need something small, but reliable.

Enter this call for assistance. As I was shopping at Costco tonight I saw the HP Mini 1033CL. (or here specifically, or here for the product line) This little thing was cool as hell. Tiny little computer, real lightweight, not tricked out but we don't need it to be. And, at $449 it just on the edge of do-able, but only with our yearly Costco credit card rebate check we just got. The small rebate for all those diapers and 8 gallons of milk each week and thousands of dollars in gas might just pay off.

So I need help. I've read the reviews, and it seems good enough. What I was hoping to do was to kick the WinXP it comes with to the curb and install ubuntu so the 60Gb hard drive might actually hold more than the 3 pics it could hold with the bloated windows OS still installed. What do you think?

Anyone? Anyone at all?

I need to make friends with some more geeks.