For what Its worth, I had tried to get it to work on an original 1.86ghz intel core duo with 1g ram and an nvidia geforce go 7300 using linux. I was running xfce instead of gnome/kde (because they are horribly bloated) , and had unloaded as many programs and widgets as possible to minimize ram usage. I also experimented with setting up varying amounts of compressed swap to minimize swapping to disk.
On the application side, I had turned down the settings as much as possible. Shaders were set to low, resolution was fairly low, so were textures I think ... also I had prevented it from loading all models and sound was turned off... anyway, hydlaa was still very crashy. The only way to fix that was to get more ram.
I tried experimenting with using a flash card for swap ( as I read that it could outperform a hard disk in some cases due to low latency ( no head movement) ) , but I found that it was much slower - even with the more expensive 20mb/sec flash cards. ( a hard drive transfers in the hundreds of mb/sec )
You might be able to force that netbook to work outside of hydlaa... but hydlaa is where most of the action is... My advice is get a laptop with at least 4 gigs of ram and a 2ghz processor or better. ( multiple cores don't help with PS ) . Make sure it has a decent nvidia card. You can probably get a desktop PC or Laptop with these specs for under $400 USD.