Notebook or netbook?

The Atom processors are low power, single core Intel CPUs. Netbooks aren't really designed to do much but surf the web and check e-mail so if you need to do anything intensive, you might be better off just getting a portable laptop.

With the Mini 12 you'd have to get an external DVD drive. And you wouldn't need much RAM since XP doesn't require a whole lot. Plus you won't be doing a lot of intensive stuff on this netbook, mainly because you can't.

Im basically going to use it for school, I have a accounting class, and history class, and an online nutrition class(a requirement)., so i wont be doing any heavy typing. Thing is I'm very tall, and fear my hands will be to big(although the mini twelve was surprising comfortable at microcenter) to type on the mini 12 or leaning over for long periods of time because of the smallish screen

Another consideration is whatever else you might have. I don't think I would want a netbook unless I also had a desktop or larger notebook at home. You can map the desktop/notebook dvd drive to the netbook as a network drive. Lenovo's S12 might be a little better than Dell's Mini 12 (check around), though not sure you can try it in store (i'd definitely lean to lenovo for build-quality/reliability). It's really nice carrying around a netbook, occasionally frustrating to use (I'm referring to 10" netbooks tho). Its cheap and easy to upgrade to 2gb of memory later.