new toy: eeepc

I had been posting before about buying an OLPC, but once I figured out what I was looking for in a sub-notebook/PDA, it looked more and more like the Asus eeepc was what I wanted.

Had a bit of Christmas money left, so I'm now posting from my new 2G Surf version.

First thoughts: cool. Small. Cool.

The keyboard will take some getting used to. It, too, is very small.

Haven't decided whether to keep the Xandros default install or go for Ubuntu (there's an optimised version for the eee pc) or XP.

Comments

Jon's picture

I, sir, am jealous of you. Congratulations. Wink

eeun's picture

Thanks! Aside from buying components for incremental PC upgrades, I haven't bought a new computer in one go since 1998 (Bondi Rev. A iMac)...and I've never bought a new laptop or PDA before.

Congratulations! Those look like great little machines. If I hadn't picked up a used 12" powerbook a couple of years ago, I would definitely be buying one.

Just my luck; for years I searched in vain for a Psion Netbook replacement, and not long after giving up a good option comes out.

eeun's picture

I've now got XP installed, and after using nLite to pare down components, it's about 650M, or roughly half the size of the default Xandros install.

A hack that I'm interested in is Here, doing like we always wanted to do with the iMac's mezz slot. USB devices can be attached to the eeepc's unused mini-PCI Express connector for extra drives, Bluetooth, etc. without them sticking out the side USB connectors.

Emulation is necessary, of course. Atari 8-bit and ST emulators are now installed and run very well full-screen. In the thumbnail below, I'm running the intro for Frontier: Elite II under the fantastic Steem ST emulator.
Frontier: Elite II on eeepc
The screen is -really- nice, with a viewing angle much better than my PC's LCD, and very crisp. It's running at about 133 dpi, 800 x 480 (though a software hack will let it go higher).

Next up is an SD card larger than the 512 MB I borrowed from my camera so I can try an Ubuntu install on it.

madmax_2069's picture

ooh nice, i was always interested in one of those, so are you happy with it running XP. was there any drawbacks on slimming down XP.

eeun's picture

There's trade-offs. The Xandros distro it comes with is very slick, and geared towards the smaller screen.

I went with XP since once it was installed, I knew there'd be no learning curve to get the programs I want up and running. Once I read up more on Xandros I may go back.

Getting XP onto it was a challenge, since I don't have any external USB drives, and had to do the install from a very slow USB flash drive.

Right now, I've got it hooked up to my PC monitor, kbd and mouse. For casual surfing and text work it could easily replace my desktop. I experienced a few YouTube frame drops on an amusing video, but my wife's PC was having trouble with Flash video yesterday as well so it may have just been network lag.