I picked up a pair of Belkin Gigabit Powerline AV units but ended up returning them. In my home, I was only able to get maximum of 60Mbps at a somewhat usable location. Usable location meaning not side by side in the same room. Not only that, the units would lose their brains occasionally and would require a reboot, looks like I'm just going to have to run cat5e.
Anyhow, now that the new Zotac Ion mobos support Wake-On-USB, I couldn't pass up a great deal at NCIX and ended up buying a package with the mobo and 4GB of ram for just over $200CDN. I probably won't have time to build the system any time soon so it's sitting on the shelve in the den.
I did however finally grab a netbook. I bought an Asus EEE 1005HA from the US which will probably come out to around $310CDN after taxes and cashback/rebates. First thing I did was deny the Windows XP EULA and installed Moblin on it. Apart from the very poor Wifi performance, I have been very impressed with Moblin. It's designed specifically for Netbooks with very little screen real estate and while it's still in the beta stage, it seems fairly stable so far. I was able to determine the poor Wifi performance is Moblin specific since Windows 7 Wifi has no problems. In Moblin, the network connection would disconnect/reconnect every 10min or so, and iwconfig showed 20-30db poorer signal that my other linux laptop. Since going to Windows 7 on the device has really made me appreciate how nicely done Moblin's UI is thought out for netbooks. I'm hoping to get some feature requests in, however the project's webpage is poorly laid out and I'm having a little trouble trying to figure out where enhancement requests would go.
