AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA THE ATOM IS DEAD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
That was a fun freak out.
So there could be any reason for someone to get an atom. Need a netbook? An interest in a chinese tablet that has one? (wpad for example). In any sense these are neat machines that have more than enough firepower to play some games, not all (deus ex, combat arms, maybe minecraft but vanilla depending on your machine), but enough that you can do all sorts with them.
Heres my machine.
Acer Kav10 D150 (GOT THE BIOS FIXED WOOOO)
Atom N270 (1.72 GHZ, Hyper threading)
2 GB DDR2-800 (kingston for me)
GPU: Intel Mobile 945GM
1024X600 screen
Dvorak KB (because I am insane)
ALSO SATA 2 FOR SOME REASON (250 GB drive)
Edit: Oh yeah I also took the wireless B/G card out and put a wireless N card instead that is held in place with gorilla tape. I wanted 15 MBPS downloads in steam D:
On my machine's release the provided OS was XP. At the time, Vista came out and acer had released some of these machines with vista but due to customer complaints of the machines freezing on boot, blue screening on login, and drivers killing themselves to escape the agony, Acer went with XP instead and even mailed out USB keys to the owners that wanted them.
My machine came from the high school that I went to / worked IT for and I refurbed it myself. At the moment it is running Manjaro JWM because arch and reasons. You can try to install windows but you will quickly be out of luck. The last time I tried windows on this thing was when 8 was released the summer befor my senior year and it ran like ass. I have no intentions of trying again either. If you need windows and have an atom machine praise be to gaben ifyou have over 2 GHZ and HT because you will need it. If you have 2 or more cores you might be fine but I personally have never seen a multi-core atom, though I do know they exist somewhere in the ether.
I use mine for writing things and code. It may not seem like a good machine for it but running monodevelop on an atom is worth the time. It may take a while to compile big scripts but worth the weight in gold for a small low power coding machine. With a battery that lasts me 3 hours, plus having a spare (you can get one for ten dollars, I just scarfed one off a dead unit that needed BGA repair), one of these may not hold up to today's standards, at least of my machine, but they handle themselves.
As I said it does handle games. FTL can run as well as deus exand combat arms. These machines aren't normally fitted with good gpu's unless you happened to get an optimus machine in which CAN I Buy IT FROM YOU?? Most optimus machines, like the acer C720 chrombook, can actually handle a lot of gpu tasks. Atom and Celeron versions of the C720 specifically can run skyrim. While I wouldn't get an atom chromebook to game on, it is certainly fun to hack these little things.
Really if you were to get an atom laptop that would be the point. Its not a workhorse, not a gamer, not a good ereader machine even, it is a toy to hack into your own godly gold foil wrapped piece of shit. I want to go over what I do with mine and if you have one laying around or its all you have, in some cases, then hopefully I am ofsome help.