↑ Asus eee PC
My first opinion is that companies never space out their products to match the way that I purchase them. I have wanted a netbook for years (a small, light portable computer) and was really happy when that market took off. Not being one to jump in to a new category I was waiting for the new 9″ eee pc (the original version was 7″) and bought one almost as soon as it came out because I wanted it for a trip that I was about to go on. So I bought the 900 and paid a premium because it was new. It seemed that within weeks the 901 had come out and the 10″ models were announced. Oh well, what can you do?
First off, I think that netbooks in general are great. Not as a primary computer but something light and convenient for when you travel. I had been looking at overly expensive Sonys and Panasonic computers to fill this need but they were still too heavy because they crammed a full feature set into the small form factor. Thank you Asus for igniting this new product category.
As for the 900 eee pc specifically there are 3 major attributes that affect use:
- screen size and resolution: adequate
- keyboard: much too cramped but okay for small amounts of text entry
- batter life: too short; try to find an outlet (the AC adapter is pretty small and light)
I run Linux in the advanced mode and that is adequate for what I want to do. I have 20Gbyte of solid state storage and that has been more than enough because I keep most of my documents “in the cloud”.
The processor is slow but I’m not doing anything demanding so it is fine. It can play audio and show videos without stuttering and those are the most computationally intensive activities that I do on it.
Wifi and wired network access both work very well and I never have problems getting connected.
There is no way to password protect the machine through Linux so I use a BIOS password and that is fine for basic security. Since I don’t keep any sensitive files on the machine I don’t worry about encrypted filespace.
It is as great going through airports as I expected. Being so small and light I don’t need a special laptop bag. I just throw it into my backpack for whatever case I am carrying. It is very easy to pull it out to go through security and with the solid state drives I’m not too worried about handling it somewhat roughly. It is also boots quickly and is easy to pull out and use in an airport or airplane. I just came back from a 3 1/2 week trip to Thailand that included travel to a lot of rural areas. The eee pc handled all the travel very well. Except for 2 nights when we stayed out in the middle of nowhere I was able to get online every day. I even had a skype call back to the US and it worked like a charm.
It comes with firefox and skype installed and those are my internet tools of choice. With the package manager (in advanced mode) it was easy to install emacs (for editing text files) and some other utility programs.
Overall, I am very pleased with the netbook. I would prefer more battery life because you can only get a couple of hours which isn’t enough for many plane rides. Also a bigger keyboard so that I can touch type without constantly hitting the wrong keys would be a big improvement. However, there are already netbooks out there that I think are much better in those regard than the 900 so I look forward to my next one.
