I bit the bullet, and picked up an Asus Eee PC today, while I failed at an attempt to get a rack. Its a 4GB model, with the webcam, and its on its 3rd run, i.e. I’ve got a model without a mini-PCIe connector. The slot is there, but the connector itself is missing – really, silly of them (can you actually save that much money, on a connector?). This batch arrived at OfficeWorks around 27/12/2007 from what I can tell (that’s whats written on the box), and its a 7C model (basically, the only model you get the mini-PCIe connector was the 7A one).
For what it’s worth, OfficeWorks and The Good Guys are price-matched for the Eee PC, while JB-HiFi comes next, with Myer holding the top retail price. Of course, all this is pending you actually getting to a store with stock of the item – I picked mine up from OfficeWorks, in Prahan (South Melbourne for instance, was out of stock).
Now, on to the machine.
Pros:
- You pop the battery in, and the boot-up process is near instantaneous, because its booting from a SSD.
- Standard applications ship with it: Pidgin for IM, Skype for
video-chat, OpenOffice.org for all your office needs, Acrobat Reader
for PDFs (why not just evince?) and a whole bunch more. - The trackpad works perfectly, and even though
there is only “one” mouse button, it provides a 2-button interface. - Its nice to have a laptop where suspend and resume work out of
the box. - The external display, just works (adjusting to the size
of the external display, as opposed to mirroring for instance). - The power supply is very smart. You can remove the Australian plug, and
see a US-based plug beneath. Either way, it can be used on most modern
airlines now, even in economy (if you’re on a quality airline, like
Singapore Airlines, for instance). - There’s a carrying case that comes in the box, which I’m sure will be handy when I’m about to throw it into my backpack.
Cons:
- The child-like interface, that is almost comparable to, if not worse, than what Sugar will offer you.
- You might be tempted to then say, “Computer Web”, to then hear the voice of a lady then say “Web” fairly softly, and launch Firefox. Not too impressive – for example, I had the Red Hot Chilli Peppers playing in the background, and in my limited use of voice control, I managed to even open up the Clock when I wanted the web browser.
- I tried the dictionary. Its nice to know there actually is an offline dictionary, but its really not too usable. The Longman dictionary is probably ideal if you were speaking/reading/writing Chinese, but I’d have taken an Oxford, or even a Webster’s anyday.
- The keyboard itself, is a tad small, but one will be able to get used
to it. The positioning of the right Shift key, is not optimal, and I’ve
seen hacks of people replacing the keys (physically!) and then making
use of Xmodmap to fix it. - 800×480 is a tough resolution to get used to. Sure, you’ve got a 7″ screen, but its an odd resolution, and some websites tend not to render properly at this resolution any longer (which is sad).
I wanted a lot more than Xandros could offer me. About the only time I felt at home, was when I hit Ctrl+Alt+T (for the Terminal). At this point, I thought of either installing Ubuntu or Fedora; naturally, I went with the latter, something called Eeedora. More about this, in another post.
What do I think of the machine? Overall, I like it. Its a great sub-notebook. Haven’t tried the battery out yet, but I hear I’ll get about 3 hours of juice from it.
I definitely need to upgrade the RAM – 512MB just doesn’t cut it in this modern world, and a 2GB chip is pretty affordable these days. While I’m there, I might as well get a nice big USB thumb drive, as well as a huge SD card (the slot does SDHC, so maybe some 8GB will be nice?).
Happy to have supported yet another vendor, doing good things with Linux. Go Asus! (similarly, go Nokia for all your beta-quality tablet devices, Dell for Linux laptops [that still haven’t reached the APAC region], and I’m sure I’m missing some vendors, but I’ve not purchased from them.)
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