After a long while and tons of fighting with myself I've decided to for go the home built laptop, for now; mainly because the wife just bought me a Eee PC!
I am now the proud owner of a 10.1" 1.6Ghz Atom 270 Blue 1005HAB Eee PC. Granted the thing comes with Win7 starter edition. In time I plan on loading a few different Linux distros onto it. I'm leaning towards using Ubuntu's Netbook remix and BT4, but this will come in time. I'm not sure that I want to completely remove the win7 OS for the device. The 8.5 hrs of battery life is hard to ignore. And I do know that Linux doesn't seem to be all the way up to par when it comes to battery life.
