Asus EEE Review - First Impressions

I initially heard of the ASUS EEE when I was chatting with my cousin about getting a laptop from him.  He recommended the model because it is brand new, lightweight, and very versatile for its price.  Buying an ASUS eee is the difference between those bundled stereo units with everything from a phonograph to a DVD player and purchasing each of the units separately.  The advantage, as I see it, is that you get higher quality product.  Additionally, if one component goes wrong in the system it is easier to replace or repair. 

This is the exact spec model I bought, but with a light Green color.	This is the one I wish I had bought!  You get just over 2GB of usable, fast, solid-state storage, and in a sleek black color no less!
You will definitely want to make sure you've got other sources of data storage even though the solid state memory delivers excellent performance.  With the on-board secure digital memory card reader you can use small and convienenty memory cards, or you can use an external USB hard drive.

As far as mobility is concerned, the eee has got it made.  Right now I'm typing in the driver's side of a vehicle with the screen propped up behind the steering wheel!!!  This thing is small enough to fit anywhere!  The charger unit is very compact as well. 

At $345 bucks (with rushed shipping) I feel like the EEE is a great purchase because it still leaves room in my budget for a monitor and keyboard to beef up my desktop experience.  Speakers are optional, since it already comes with a pretty nice little set of tweeters.  In contrast with most laptops, I feel like a keyboard is going to be indispensable as the built in keyboard is just a little bit too narrow for my hands, which are not that big in the first place.

One especially annoying feature of this keyboard is that it doesn't have page-up or page-down buttons.  It does have them, but you have to use the Fn+Up & Fn+Down combinations. This also includes “end” and perhaps some others I didn't notice off the bat.  Contrary to my expectations, the problem with the keyboard is not that when I try to hit one button I hit multiples ones.  It's just that sometimes when I don't type forcefully enough it just fails to recognize the keystroke.  Definitely a recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome.  The touch pad is sensitive enough, though, to do without an extra mouse for the time being.  I originally thought the button was really cheap but it turned out the computer was a little cold here in the Midwest.

With my acquisition of the Asus EEE, I will have to explore Linux a bit.  I am so frustrated with Microsoft, both its corporate nature and its products, that I am making this blind leap of faith and hopefully I'll never go back, unless Gates really shapes up his game.  The trouble is how far I went down that path...

I'm a fairly proficient Windows user.  If anyone has any good ideas for Linux resources for new users could you send them my way?  I am not sure but I think that EEE's version of Linux is a little watered down.  You could almost say that the EEE is geared toward the illiterate.  It's probably perfect for my purposes, which are just surfing and typing, for the most part.  An external hard drive will have to come later, as it will help me turn this thing into a glorified .mp3 player.

A little more about the ASUS EEE machine: it has an inbound and outbound Ethernet port, three USB 2.0 slots, a place to plug in a monitor, microphone and headphone jacks, one port of whose function I am not aware, and a slot for a digital camera's microchip (Secure Digital).  This thing only has a 2GB drive, though. It's like buying a monitor with a small CPU and small but serviceable keyboard built in.  If that's all you need, I would highly recommend the machine.  Although the boot up and shut down sequences are very short, the processing power isn't exactly what you'd call unbridled.  I don't recommend anything other than very simple software to be run on the EEE, but if you decide to, there is a flourishing hobbiest community that has had success with other operating systems.  It includes instructions for loading windows as well (not sure about vista and its 15 for a stock install).  The software that's loaded on it runs just fine- admirably, I would say, and it seems to take measures to compensate for the extreme tininess of the display. There doesn't seem to be very much that is superfluous on the EEE. 

As a networking newbie I would say the EEE lives up to its claims of automatic connectivity.  The wireless card does a good job detecting available networks but it takes a little while to connect to them.  I'm sure the learning curve isn't too steep on the thing, though.  The browser loads web pages pretty quickly, and video plays remarkably well.  I like the open source software package that comes with it, too.  Way to support the public domain, ASUS!

This is the exact spec model I bought, but with a light Green color.	This is the one I wish I had bought!  You get just over 2GB of usable, fast, solid-state storage, and in a sleek black color no less!

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