Asus EEE - Fantastic… if you need one
I have to confess to being a bit of a techie junkie – but I usually try to find ways to justify the expenditure. So the timing could not have been better when Asus announced the launch of their super micro sized EEE laptop just a few weeks before my wife and I headed off for a month long tour of New Zealand and Thailand.
Excelent for Travelling
Out of the box the eee runs on Linux, which is all well and good, but I’m used to using Outlook, Excel and Dreamweaver to keep on top of things and it didn’t seem like the right time to switch over.
Fortunately the Asus EEE runs just as well on Windows XP. A couple of points to note - the XP installation disk must have Service Pack 2 on it – any earlier and it just won’t work. Secondly, to save on space and cost, the Asus does not come with its own CD/DVD drive – so you will need to get your hands on an external drive. Fortunately I already had one for the TC1100 – so that worked out fine.
The Asus EEE comes with 4gb of solid state memory, which, somewhat surprisingly, is enough space for XP, MS Office, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and a few of the other obvious apps such as Firefox and skype. I was still left with over 1GB of space which is way more than I needed for docs.
Whilst travelling, the EEE was just great – it is about the size of a 4-500 page novel and can be shoved into the front of your daybag with ease. Using a wifi connection where available, I was able to keep up to date using skype to make phonecalls, and downloading emails to outlook for processing off-line. On flights, the size of the Asus meant that it was dead handy to tuck in to my day bag and then whip out once we had aken off.
All in all, I would say that for travelling around and trying to stay in touch with the office – the Asus is a dream come through. But here’s the ‘catch’ – on return from my trip, I put the machine back in its bag and onto a shelf… and it has sat there since. For everyday use, where there is a standard desktop or laptop available, the smaller size of the asus makes it much less attractive – there is just no reason to use it.
So if you are a frequent traveller and need a tiny laptop to keep in touch then go for the EEE, but if you just want one for the ‘new toy’ factor, I would strongly suggest trying to borrow one from someone for a day or two – you will not want to use I much around the house after the initial wow period has passed.
Easy Peasy OS
Just a quick update on this article - Although the XP install had worked fine for ages, about two months ago it packed up and refused to play ball - the dreaded permanent blue screen of death. I have now solved this by downloading and installing the custom developed EasyPeasy operating system. Easy Peasy is a flavour of ubuntu and comes packed with all the software you need to get up and running - Open Office, Firefox, Skype and lots more software is all bundeled into the package.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment