Which netbook is the best value for my money?

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Help, guys! I know people with Asperger's are sometimes stereotyped as being tech-savvy computer geeks, but the truth is I am not great with computers. For sure.

My PC has been giving me trouble for some time now (it's a five year-old emachine, so what else can I expect? lol). A friend of mine who's good with computers offered to come over and try to fix it, but if he can't, it may be time for me to think about just getting a new computer. I really can't see taking it to a professional and putting money into getting it fixed when it's not worth much to begin with.

Basically, I don't need a lot of frills and am happy as long as I can use the Internet, do a little word processing and maybe occasionally watch a movie or something. I have a tight budget, but still want something well-made enough to last a bit and not give me problems for a while.

What would you recommend and why? Any suggestions or words of wisdom will be much appreciated!

Stick Linux on the emachine - cost $0.10 (for a CD).
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Buy any netbook with Linux on it - cost circa $100?

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This machine is 14 years old, and happily runs Ubuntu 8.04, 24/7, serving up a few web sites.
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My netbook is an Acer Aspire 1, and I'm very happy with that (Ubuntu 10.10, same version as my other, not-so-ancient desktop).

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I can't say I like the latest Ubuntu. I may move to Mint, or back to pure Debian, or go minimalistic with Puppy or DSL. Or something else entirely. It's nice to have (near-)zero-cost choice.

Just curious, is it true that video players in Linux / MAC are usually slower than their Windows equivalent? Is the fastest video player windows only? (Because playing videos seems to be the most CPU heavy task the OP needs).

Depends on the format and how its played. Usually, I'm my experience video is faster on Linux than Osx/win but there are a lot of variables to be considered. Like drivers, codecs, graphical server's and composting.

I'm also in the market for a netbook so I'm putting a note here so I can follow

I'm not too "au fait" with this, but I suspect libdvdcss isn't available outside Linux, so some videos would be infinitely slower, if you're stuck with expensive Microsoft.

I have no trouble playing video. I've no idea what a "fast" video might be. If a video plays back faster than its correct speed, surely that's an error?

I had an old laptop that I used to watch DVDs on that wasn't quite fast enough with video sometimes on linux. It was from about 2001, had 128Mb RAM, and was a much less powerful machine than the Aspire One netbook I have now.

I don't think it will be a problem at all on modern hardware.

@OP
Take note that netbooks have no DVD drives.

@ lau
By fast I mean using less CPU power for playing the same video.

For the reason about I have not tried playing DVD and cannot comment. I have used libavcodec (for windows) that is the only codec with Linux version (and open source) I am aware of.

@ Ancalagon
I think so. The main problem would be playing online video and HD stuff.

I haven't ever had problems with youtube videos on my netbook.

^^^ Yes. SD video are OK, HD ones are not. It is rather pointless to watch HD videos online with a netbook, though.