I started a thread
http://machinarium.net/forum/index.php/topic,384.0.html over the fact that the day of release the requirements did not have a minimum resolution required although they do now.
The reason I was so upset is that the game seemed to play just fine on my netbook but I couldn't resume. Turns out it was a setting within the Flash player that was causing that.
I have a Dell mini10v with a display max of 1024x600 same as your machine. Once I set the Flash player to keep temp files (I normally tell it to keep none) I had a resume option whenever I restarted the game. I tested with the demo on Win 7 and I have the full game installed on OS X 10.5.8 and it works just fine without the menu. OS X also has the ability to run the game with everything scaled down to 75% so you can actually run it and see the menus. Don't know a way to do that with any version of Windows, sorry.
You loose the chance to have 6 saved games. You'll only have the option to resume when you're done. The menu also has a load choice (goes with the save choice) which you can't use, a volume setting, info on the game and developer and a fullscreen vs windowed mode choice. None of which you'll need. Just quit the game using Alt-F4 in Windows, Command-Q for OS X and if you have things setup properly you'll have a resume choice when you restart. If you don't look through the savegame threads here for things to do to make that work.