one of the things I say to potential customers to "sell our services" ()Geeks can turn off much of the bloat, for a price() is that our team can makes makes Vistas work as fasts as XP
XP was never fast. But you should know that now--you've tried Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is awful, it can only do half the things that XP can. Even getting onto my universities network is a ridiculous hassle. Before I go back to uni, I am going back to XP for my EEE
One thing XP does really well is crash. I can't make Debian do that with any regularity, even though I'm running the unstable version and upgrade as often as I have the time.
Good luck with the EEE. Hope you got that extra memory and the larger HD.
I got the original version when it came out a while back, so its not that amazing now. Unfortunately my uni have this stupid security manager thing which means Ubuntu cant access the network properly, so I have to shell out for XP. Ubuntu has crashed quite a bit regardless however, I would say its about as good as XP in that respect...