A few netbook questions

My fiancee has a 4 year old asus UL50 notebook that, aside from the DVD-ROM drive, works perfectly for her needs. At any rate, she wants a little something to have around the house to check email, go on the web, create an Excel or Word document or two., and I mentioned that Dell has these little netbooks for $300 or so.

I know nothing about these devices, so I was looking for a little insight here as to the actual performance of these window 7 laptop.

I was under the impression that these are for light use, and that's really all my fiancee wants it for. Web browsing, wireless around the house, and if possible, Office (Outlook, Word and Excel.)

Here are my basic questions:

    How are these atom processors? I fully understand that these netbooks are not meant for performance, but I'm just curious as to how well these atom CPUs work. For example, the laptop I'm working on right now is a 4 year old (almost) Dell Inspiron 6000 netbook w/ a Pentium M 1.6Ghz CPU. Will a typical Atom CPU be faster or slower than that?

    I'm looking at Dells simply because I'm used to buying Dell. We were just in Best Buy and saw an hp probook notebook and an eeePC for what seems to be slightly cheaper than Dell. It looks like a 10" screen is what she would like, or a 9" of there is a large price difference.

    These netbooks don't have optical drives, so will it be possible for me to share the optical drive on my desktop and do a network installation of Office 2k3 onto the netbook? It's not the end of the world if I can't, as I'll just download OpenOffice for her, and either have her use Thunderbird on this netbook as an email client, or just have her check her gMail via webmail.

    For what her needs are, a 16GB flash HDD or a regular (80-120GB) HDD? Does one perform better or worse than the other?

Thanks!