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Garnet's Review Of The Asus EEE PC With XP HomeGarnet's Review Of The Asus EEE PC With XP HomeWell I guess some of the reasons I'm checking it out are:
My biggest criticisms of the eee pc is that the screen needs more resolution. The screen panning works nicely at 800x600, that's enough to scroll the IE toolbars out of the way when looking at web pages.
It is very snappy. The machine has about 1.8GB of free disk space. I wasted 512mb of it on a hibernation file. With hibernation the machine starts up in under 30 seconds. With just booting it into OS, it's about 40+ seconds, so not a huge savings. But the real reason to do this is because leaving it in standby all day will use up the battery, the life on standby doesn't seem to be all that great. With hibernate, I can be back up pretty quick, but not burn my battery while I am toting the machine around during the day.
The machine doesn't come with any kind of virus checking software. This model has Windows XP home with the Asus drivers preinstalled, Microsoft Works, Outlook Express, Adobe Reader 8, and that's about it.
Not having virus scanning software may be one of the things that makes this little machine so snappy. I was asking the salesman some questions about the machine, did he think it was capable enough to be a PDA replacement, would it come out of hibernation quick enough, etc. He said it's a very small hard drive, if you try to put office, etc. on it, it will slow down.
Good point. My favorite pda of all time was the HP100LX series. Those are great. I have a whole drawer full of them. They were a complete IBM PC with Dos 3.3 in your pocket. Unfortunately HP quit making them. For me, they only lasted about a year each before the connections to the lcd display would start going back. There was an organization "The palmtop paper" that would refurbish them, but I think they finally shut down. People had done some crazy things with the amount of software they tried to stuff into that pda.
So I wonder if I should even bother with virus software on the asus eee pc. If it gets in a bind, I could just restore it back to original factory configuration. If I don't add a lot of software to it, it won't take long to get it set up for my uses, especially if most of the stuff I generate on it is wikipages that I am uploading somewhere. I suppose the biggest risk is to get a virus onto the removable SD media chip which if I take it over to one of my other machines might infect another machine.
I'm writing this note in notepad while I wait on the .net framework to finish installing. It is taking a little while to finish, I might plug back into the wall outlet to let the processor run a little faster to get it finished. I did get to an hour of web browsing, downloading, and installing, with only 30% of the battery being used.
OK, .net framework 3.5 setup just finished. Just clicked exit, and it wants to restart.... It sure is neat to open a web browser window and have it come up very quickly. Just cut and pasted these few paragraphs in before I restart.
So, I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. Using it as a web browser does work well. I've got it on max battery right now, and 40 minutes I am running on battery, and have used 20% of the battery. Let's see, at 45 minutes now, and still 80% of battery available. If this thing can hit 200 minutes of use on battery (3+ hours) that will be great.
I would like to have some kind of programming environment available in case the urge to program strikes me.
I thought about installing perl on it, but then decided it would be more useful to program the machine in C#. So I just downloaded the installer for Visual Studio C# Express, and will try installing that. If I can run a local copy of my hive wiki software directly on this Asus EEE PC, that will be very nifty.
I have to save this page now, the install for .NET 3.5 is demanding I shutdown this web browser window.
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