Registered to the forums just to be able to reply to this thread. Going through convulsions at all the inaccuracies.
First off, getting any eee PC you're in really good hands:
you have a community wiki and an extremely helpful forum w/ a subforums dedicated to each group of models:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/http://forum.eeeuser.com/most of their stuff is very well documented
An eee 700 is one of those early-on models that had really oddball hardware to make it as cheap as possible, which also made them really badly supported out-of-the-box by many popular Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. To compensate for this, Asus made their own Linux distro ( based on Xandros IIRC ) with everything the laptop needed to run well included. Asus also understood that some people might want XP on their laptop so with the laptop they included a booklet explaining how to get XP on it without an optical drive. If you didn't get that with your netbook you can probably find a copy of it online, if you ever decide you want XP on it, that is.

As time went by they stopped providing updates for their Linux distro and it disintegrated into obsolescence, but by that time the fine folks over at eeeuser.com had already largely replaced it with really good hardware-specific respins of lots of popular linux distros complete with patched kernels tailored for the netbook.
Try and find a guide for your model somewhere on that website, it makes it very easy, even for non-technical people.
Also, keep in mind that this computer was considered underpowered 3 years ago, imagine how underpowered it is now.
I used to own an eee 2G Surf, fun little laptop
