Mini laptop: Asus eeePC

Posted by on April 15, 2008, 10:58am, 1,825 views

I bought a “new toy” as my wife calls it. It’s a mini laptop computer … an Asus eeePC 4GB black notebook with Windows XP to be precise.

This link is to where I bought it. The unit arrived yesterday.

I must say I am very impressed and so is everyone I’ve shown it to. It has a tiny screen and a small “solid state drive” of 4GB, but gee it’s a mighty midget.

It’s great to see Windows XP performing in this environment. The Asus was originally released last year with a modified version of Xandros Linux, and although I’m a Linux fan, nothing beats the software choice and hardware compatibility of Windows.

There’s no way you could run Windows Vista on this system. In my opinion, XP is the best version of Windows ever, and I can remember back to 3.1.

The computer came with Windows Live and Microsoft Works installed. They were redundant space hogs as far as I was concerned and after successfully installing Office 2003 I got rid of them.

I added Firefox to the hard drive, which left me about 500MB for storage.

The PC has three USB points and came with a 4GB flash memory card for a slot at the back.

I’ve installed software on the card including Illustrator 10 (yes, amazing it works), FileZilla, Notepad++, The Gimp, Pidgin and a few others.

Programs are slower to load off the card and I may revisit some of those choices.

In fact it may be better not to run them from there at all. My 4GB U2 USB drive might be a better option, although I’m less likely to always have it with me.

Connectivity is a breeze. The ethernet ADSL worked instantly, and I successfully employed my JasJam phone as a wireless modem.

I wasted more time than necessary trying to set this up, because the “Internet Sharing” tool in Windows Mobile 6 handled it easily once I discovered it.

At work today I said goodbye to the firewall which bans access to my own site as “adult content” and enjoyed mobile internet access on a tiny notebook beside my main computer.

To use the internet this way you obviously need a data plan with your mobile phone company. Telstra is one of the most expensive in Australia ($25 a month for 80MB) but the coverage is wider.

The eeePC synced nicely with my JasJam as well.

When I showed a few people this morning, one of them said “great computer, shame about the name”. It sounds like eeee as in the Knights who say Ni.

These articles might be of interest: