Again, the Asus F102BA gets my vote.
shipping now.
***
I'm deeply sympathetic to Microsoft's issues with trying to
maintain an old operating system that has a well-deserved
reputation for being bug- and security-hole-ridden (albeit not
as bad as some of its predecessors). At the same time, some of
us have a strong preference for machines in the class most
recently known as "netbooks" -- screens in the 7 - 9 inch range,
maybe stretching to 10 or 10.1, but no larger; weight under 1 Kg
including power supply "bricks"; real (as distinct from
chicklet, touch/promimity, or onscreen keyboards), long battery
life; etc. Because they have tended to be a little underpowered
for the fancy graphics and other demands of Windows from Vista
forward, my recollection is that those machines were shipping
with XP well into 2010 and probably into 2011. So they are not
quite as ancient as some of the correspondence implies. More
important, there are, as far as I know, no replacements: the
Ultrabooks (and the smallest Mac) are larger, heavier, and don't
provide the battery life. Windows 7 and 8 (even Win 7 Starter)
simply won't run acceptably on that range of machines.
So it isn't just the embedded machines... or being too cheap to
buy a Win 7 (or 8) laptop.
john