I ran into a little problem with getting a “fresh” Windows 7 installed on to my net book. After a bit of research I found the following procedure… and it worked perfectly!!!
Without further ado… here are the Vista instructions for how you can create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 7 on your system.
1. Format USB flash drive to NTFS format
For Vista users can directly format the USB drive to NTFS format
2. Disk-Part the Drive
On the Start menu, navigate to the command prompt entry. Right-click and select Run as administrator.
Type
diskpart
list disk
Record the disk number of your USB flash drive.
Select the USB disk.
select disk X (X is the drive number of the USB flash drive)
List the current partition. Record the partition number.
list partition
Select the current partition and make it active.
select partition Y (Y is the partition number of the USB flash drive)
active
3. Prepare the OS files
Download Windows 7 file to your desktop.
Download and install PowerISO from http://poweriso.com/.
Right-click on the Windows 7 iso file and select Extract files. Extract the files to a folder (you can name the folder any name you want, but for illustration purpose, I name it win-7) in your desktop.
In your command prompt, cd to the windows 7 folder.
cd Desktop/win-7 (Change the destination to the folder that you have extracted)
cd boot
bootsect /nt60 X: (X is the drive latter of your USB drive )
Now, copy all the files from the Windows 7 folder to the USB flash drive.
Reboot the computer. Remember to change the first boot device to your USB drive in the BIOS.
You should be able to install Windows 7 from your USB flash drive now.
danielheth 
I’m going to give this a go tonight. This didn’t even occur to me. Thanks.
I just wanted to thank you and let others know that this really does work. I tried other similar methods but they didn’t work. They key in this tutorial if the NTFS format of the USB drive…other tutorials leave this out or tell you to use FAT32; that does work. This tutorial worked perfectly on my HP Mini 2140!
i would always prefer to use netbooks when i am on the move because they are so very convenient to carry around -.;
Since this post, I’ve actually switched to using my iPad more often. I spent the extra money on a 3g version and absolutely love it.
I still have the iPad v1, planning to skip v2 in favor of v3 coming out in 6 months.