It seems the very product that Intels Atom N280 and GN40 chipset is geared for is keeping the duo from showing its full potential.

Intel's Atom N280 combined with the GN40 chipset are designed for netbooks and one of their main selling points is hardware video decoding. The problem lies in that for the platform to a show performance increase, DirectX 10 and DXVA 2.0 (DirectX Video Acceleration 2.0) is required.

Most netbooks are still selling with Windows XP and as such can't make use of the enhanced features that Intel's platform provides. HKEPC took one of the netbooks with Intel's platform and confirmed it was an issue with Windows XP when they proved it only worked on Vista.

Interestingly enough, DigiTimes dug into the issue a little bit and contacted some vendors in Taiwan, and they say that the issue doesn't exist. For those that plan on using a netbook for video decoding, keep this in mind when making your purchase.