Asus Eee PC- original post to myspace on 10/17/08
So I guess this is sort of a review. We picked up an Asus Eee PC for our two-year wedding anniversary… although I’ve been hogging it mostly thus far. Here’s the run-down for anybody who is interested in one….
So the eee pc is a small (tiny) laptop, the one we purchased was only $299 at target and was bundled with Xandros linux and their own custom application launcher. This model has no cd, hard drive, or anything like that… just solid state storage (4 gigs) and plenty of usb and an sd slot. It has half a gig of memory and a mobile celeron processor that I believe is rated at 900mhz. I was skeptical about what kind of performance this thing could crank out - but it’s not terrible actually. So on to the good, bad, and the ugly….
THE GOOD
* Very affordable, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, it’s a real pc. It can run windows, linux - or do anything a normal pc laptop with these specs would do. Target was acting like it was a barbe leapfrog toy or something, but it’s a real computer.
* The smallness of it is both a good and bad - the bright size is that it’s totally portable and eye-catching. To give you and idea, it’s easy to hold in one hand, it’s more the size of a DS than a laptop. I think the entire computer is smaller than the keyboard on my macbook.
* Although the specs are low it does perform better than expected. One application open at a time should give you no lagging, and even a few running at once is not an issue. I’d expect if you tried to run photoshop, a few virtual machines, and some games - you might feel some lagging!
* Features are nice. Many eee pc’s are equipped with web cams. Ours has a mic at least. Ours has 3 usb, a vga, the audio plugs, and power. (did i forget any?) You also get an sd card which is an affordable way to get more storage space on it.
THE BAD
* The xandros on there is tuned well I suppose, but firefox crashed on us within the first 5 minutes we used it. The custom interface reminds me of “at ease” if anybody knows what I’m talking about. I really couldn’t stand the launcher and the crashing made us consider if we should just try and return it. I’ve since installed ubuntu and am much happier with it.
* Did I mention the application launcher and xandros thing sucked? I’m worried the computer will not do well because it comes off like a barbe leapfrog because of the overly-simple launcher. Just ditch that and get windows or ubuntu on it.
* Typing is horrible. The keyboard is the width of just ONE of my hands. It’s almost as hard as typing on my centro smartphone.
* It feels cheap compared to my macbook. The clicky on the trackpad sucks.
* The screen is larger than previous models, but the resolution is something like 1024×600 which can be a light tight at times. Especially in ubuntu - some of the windows are obviously designed with a minimum of 1024×768 in mind (the ok/cancel gets cut off, etc)
THE UGLY
Ok so to summarize, I think the eee PC is great because of it’s price. It’s by no means a workhorse so geeks like me will only use it as a toy. Consumers, who I imagine it’s designed for - may find it limited due to the stupid application launcher. I would like to see it with a trimmed down install of ubuntu or fedora. People are going to think linux got a lobotomy. Windows would be fine on it, but that would up its price.
I’m trying to imagine how a consumer would receive it. They may look at it like a PDA. I mean, my cell phone can do office documents and web browsing too. Plus the xandros OS is way limited, but I understand why they tried to simplify it as well. For anyone like me, we’ll scrub the drive and the sky’s the limit. Of course that introduces some challenges as well. If you’re up for it I’ll walk you through some of it…
GETTING WINDOWS RUNNING
To get windows running you have to either attach a usb CD drive and install or make a bootable usb drive. The usb drive thing can be a little tricky. You basically have to have it formatted and partitioned correctly, and set it as a bootable drive. There is a good tutorial and tools for download here: http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/installing-windows-xp-from-usb-thumb.html
GETTING LINUX TO RUN
Same deal as windows in the sense that you can either use a usb cd drive or make a bootable usb stick. This process is actually quite easier. http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html This tool will do most of the work of formatting the drive, and copying over files from the ubuntu iso for you. Nifty.
In both cases you have to go into the bios and choose the drive as the startup device. You can install normally.. however keep an eye on which drive is which. Ubutnu, for example, tries to install the bootloader on the usb stick by default. (Since it’s considering it a hard drive) Also there are various optimizations that can be done. The biggest of which (with ubuntu anyways) is to get a copy of the eee pc optimized kernel - they’ve got the mic and wifi working which don’t otherwise. I think there’s also some performace tweaks in there as well. Be careful about running updates that you don’t lose this kernel, or that the bootloader changes which kernel or something like that. Lastly, there are some drive settings that can be made in fstab - I haven’t done this yet but I was reading something along this lines and the default is designed for phyical disks whereas the eeepc has solid state and would run better with a different read strategy. Anyhow maybe I can go into the ubuntu thing more later, for now - if you have $299 to blow - take a looksie at the asus.
