{"id":703,"date":"2008-01-26T10:17:07","date_gmt":"2008-01-26T15:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2008\/01\/26\/adventures-in-eee-pc-land"},"modified":"2008-01-30T20:10:06","modified_gmt":"2008-01-31T01:10:06","slug":"adventures-in-eee-pc-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2008\/01\/26\/adventures-in-eee-pc-land","title":{"rendered":"Adventures in Eee PC land"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;ve got a model without a mini-PCIe connector. The slot is there, but the connector itself is missing &#8211; really, silly of them (can you actually save that much money, on a <em>connector<\/em>?). This batch arrived at OfficeWorks around 27\/12\/2007 from what I can tell (that&#8217;s whats written on the box), and its a <strong>7C<\/strong> model (basically, the only model you get the mini-PCIe connector was the 7A one).<\/p>\n<p>For what it&#8217;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 &#8211; I picked mine up from OfficeWorks, in Prahan (South Melbourne for instance, was out of stock).<\/p>\n<p>Now, on to the machine.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pros:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You pop the battery in, and the boot-up process is near instantaneous, because its booting from a SSD.<\/li>\n<li>Standard applications ship with it: Pidgin for IM, Skype for<br \/>\nvideo-chat, OpenOffice.org for all your office needs, Acrobat Reader<br \/>\nfor PDFs (why not just evince?) and a whole bunch more.<\/li>\n<li>The trackpad works perfectly, and even though<br \/>\nthere is only &#8220;one&#8221; mouse button, it provides a 2-button interface.<\/li>\n<li>Its nice to have a laptop where suspend <strong>and<\/strong> resume work out of<br \/>\nthe box.<\/li>\n<li>The external display, just works (adjusting to the size<br \/>\nof the external display, as opposed to mirroring for instance).<\/li>\n<li>The power supply is very smart. You can remove the Australian plug, and<br \/>\nsee a US-based plug beneath. Either way, it can be used on most modern<br \/>\nairlines now, even in economy (if you&#8217;re on a quality airline, like<br \/>\nSingapore Airlines, for instance).<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s a carrying case that comes in the box, which I&#8217;m sure will be handy when I&#8217;m about to throw it into my backpack.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Cons:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The child-like interface, that is almost comparable to, if not worse, than what <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.laptop.org\/go\/Sugar\">Sugar<\/a> will offer you.<\/li>\n<li>You might be tempted to then say, &#8220;Computer Web&#8221;, to then hear the voice of a lady then say &#8220;Web&#8221; fairly softly, and launch Firefox. Not too impressive &#8211; 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.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;d have taken an Oxford, or even a Webster&#8217;s anyday.<\/li>\n<li>The keyboard itself, is a tad small, but one will be able to get used<br \/>\nto it. The positioning of the right Shift key, is not optimal, and I&#8217;ve<br \/>\nseen hacks of people replacing the keys (physically!) and then making<br \/>\nuse of Xmodmap to fix it.<\/li>\n<li>800&#215;480 is a tough resolution to get used to. Sure, you&#8217;ve got a 7&#8243; screen, but its an odd resolution, and some websites tend not to render properly at this resolution any longer (which is sad).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>What do I think of the machine? Overall, I like it. Its a great sub-notebook. Haven&#8217;t tried the battery out yet, but I hear I&#8217;ll get about 3 hours of juice from it.<\/p>\n<p>I definitely need to upgrade the RAM &#8211; 512MB just doesn&#8217;t cut it in this modern world, and a 2GB chip is pretty affordable these days. While I&#8217;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?).<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t reached the APAC region], and I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;m missing some vendors, but I&#8217;ve not purchased from them.)<\/p>\n<p>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/asus\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">asus<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/eeepc\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">eeepc<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/eee\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">eee<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/asus%20eee%20pc\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">asus eee pc<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/review\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">review<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/7c\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">7c<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/linux\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">linux<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;ve got a model without a mini-PCIe connector. The slot is there, but the connector itself is missing &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4vJD-bl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}