James Burgess

As I mentioned the other day, I acquired an EeePC the other day - and now I plan to tell you about my experiences with it so far. I’m not going to write a thesis on the topic, but I’ll go over the basics.

Sizing
Size is the key aspect of this product, and bigger isn’t always better. I’ve heard so many people complain that the screen is unusable at such a size (a shade over 7″) and the keyboard isn’t usable for anyone with fingers thicker than pencils. Well, neither of those aspects is true.

I have large hands, and large fingers, and the keyboard is easy enough to use. After a few minutes of practice, I was up to an almost-normal touch-typing speed, with very few mistakes that I can put down to the keyboard’s size. An oddity is that the numbers on the number row are shifted left by one, so instead of typing - for example - 14, I keep typing 25. No big deal, I’ll get used to it.

As for the screen - of course it could do with being a little bigger (and later this year, it will be a bit bigger… but probably more expensive as well), but I’m happy with it. Some applications do overflow the screen a little, but for the benefits this unit displays, it’s not a great burden having to Alt+drag to move the window around a bit.

Specification
The Eee’s processor comes factory underclocked on all models (mine is a 4G) - and is apparently capable of 930MHz, according to ASUS… I’m yet to test that theory out. The storage is a Solid State Drive, 4Gb in size, and it is, obviously, quite small. Don’t expect to be able to fit your music collection on there - though with 3 USB ports and an SD card slot, you can quite easily expand it by a number of Gb, at least until you get around to opening the Eee up and doing some clever modding.

The most impressive aspect, for me, is that it comes with a decent 512Mb of RAM, which allows for multitasking - despite what many people are saying about the impracticality of it (size-related moaning, yet again).

Operating System
The machine comes pre-installed with ASUS’ own version of the Xandros Linux distribution - and whilst it is very limited, it does perform well for the simple tasks for which the machine is designed. I haven’t got around to installing another, smaller, distribution on it yet (Xandros takes about a gig, all things accounted for), but I do plan to install Damn Small Linux on it.

ASUS’s official line is that Windows XP can be happily installed on the Eee (and they are also releasing the new model with the option of having XP pre-installed instead of Xandros). I’ve seen examples of OS X being installed on it as well, but I shan’t be venturing down that route due to the sheer size of the operating system - and the fact that I’d rather save the RAM and CPU cycles for more useful things.

Other Bits
A few other bits and bobs… Firstly, applications, the OS comes with a decent set application of applications - from OpenOffice to Pidgin, pretty much anything you could want to do on a machine of that size, you can… straight out of the box.

Additionally, just a brief mention of the battery. The battery life is good, I’ve had over three-and-a-half hours off of one battery use (turned down screen brightness, no sound), which I was quite impressed by. The weight of the battery pack is just about 50% of the unit’s weight, and can be easily swapped out for those of you with greater power requirements.

Overall
I’m really happy with my Eee, and I can’t wait to start customising it, modding it, and making it even more awesome than it already is. I’ve happily typed several pages of notes on it, thus far, and it’s obviously nice and portable. I’d recommend it to anyone who needs to do simple, office-related tasks out and about - or simply wants a nice little project or web PC to fiddle around with. Top notch.