I was already thinking of picking up a Dell Mini 9 when Scott Hanselman blogged about his, and I'd dropped hints to my dear wife that I would love one for Christmas.  She told me point-blank that she wasn't buying a computer for me, so I went to back to shopping on my own. 

Right about the time I was ready to click "buy" on Dell's website, my friend John Batdorf told me about his new Eee PC.  He was infinitely pleased with his, so I went to NewEgg and bought one of my own for far less than I was going to spend on the Dell.  It got here today.

It's slightly larger than I expected, having seen the previous generation of Eee PCs, but I suppose that's fine since it yields a slightly larger keyboard.  Upon unboxing it and booting into Windows XP Home, I fell in love.  It's a zippy little thing, easily as fast as my 1.8 Ghz Centrino laptop.  The keyboard layout is cramped,  but pretty easy to navigate, and Asus provides all the usual hotkeys, as well as some new ones (like a key for Taskman).

After taking the dime tour in XP, I installed a 2 GB DIMM.  For reference, here's the procedure I used:

1. Reboot, press F2 before Windows loads to go into the BIOS setup.
2. On the "boot" tab, disable Boot Boost (and LEAVE it disabled at least until Vista is installed and stable).  Save your changes, shut down the PC.
3. Unplug the PC and remove the batter. 
4. Remove the service panel on the bottom by removing two screws.  When you pry the service panel open, it will put up more resistance than you anticipate.  Be gentle, but persistent, and it will come off.
5. Remove the 1 GB DIMM.  Replace it with the 2 GB DIMM.
6. Replace the service panel, reboot, verify it worked.

At this point, I decided it was time to install Vista.  Using an ISO of Vista SP1, I created a bootable USB flash drive using this guy's procedure.  Then I started my Vista install.  Here are the steps you'll need to do the same:

1. Insert the USB drive with your Vista installation files, reboot, press Esc before Windows loads to bring up  the boot menu, and select the USB media (not F9, my bad, sorry John!).
2. Once in Vista setup, configure your partitions the way you want them.  My Eee had 4 partitions, two of which were NTFS and were obviously my C: and D: drives.  Partitions 3 and 4 were not NTFS, and looked suspiciously like restore partitions, so I left them alone.  I deleted partitions 1 and 2, however, and created a single primary NTFS partition for Vista.  Apply your own preferences as applicable.  45 minutes later, I booted into Vista for the first time.
3. The first thing you'll want to fix are the bad devices in Device Manager.  First, I updated the two "Network Adapter" items with drivers from the included support DVD, and they turned out to be the wireless and ethernet adapters.
4. Then I went to Intel's website and downloaded and installed the latest driver package for my chipset.
5. Finally, there was one additional bad entry in Device Manager.  I followed this procedure to download and install the ACPI driver, which corrected that last bad entry, as well as enabling all my hotkeys.
6. I went to the Asus download page and installed the Super Hybrid Engine utility, the Asus Instant Key utility, and the Asus Updater, which I used to update to the most recent BIOS.  For each of those,  the Asus installer will throw an error that Windows 6 isn't supported.  Sure it is.  Just don't use the Asus installer.  There will be another executable in the same directory as the Asus setup program.  You'll recognize it by its InstallShield icon.  Apparently, Asus' program is just a bootstrapper.  Go straight to the InstallShield installer.
7. After the BIOS update, the wireless network card  and the webcam were disabled by default.  The system tray utility that came with the ACPI driver can reactivate them.
8. At some point during my first few hours with my Vista-enabled Eee PC, sound quit working.  Since I was just using Vista's default drivers, I  downloaded and installed Asus' drivers, which appears to fix the issue.

And that's it!  My little Eee PC is running Vista happily with Aero and all the bells and whistles.  There's no serious degradation in performance over the default XP installation.  I noticed that the CPU appears to be dual-core.  It's not - it's hyperthreaded, so to Windows, it appears to be dual-core.

I installed Chrome, Firefox, Pidgin, Windows Live Writer, some miscellaneous other stuff, ran TweakUAC to get UAC to nag me less, cleaned up my start menu (I loathe messy start menus), and am now enjoying my Eee PC with Vista.