I know. The title is a bit much–and quite possibly, incorrectly punctuated–but hear me out, please! This is a bit of a performance review of my Eee PC. Overall, I’m very happy with my Eee. I only wish the battery lasted just a bit longer. I did have a couple incidences in which I thought I had (gulp!) lost my Eee to the dark side. The screen froze up to the point where I had to turn off the power to reboot. (Sorry techies, but I don’t know the term for this. Is it a hard reboot?) Anyhow, I’m happy to report that I was able to resuscitate my Eee!
Why should you take the plunge, you ask. Aha, excellent question. Let me name the top ten reasons the Eee 2G surf will improve your life:
10. Girls: It’s cute, comes in several colors (sky blue, pink, green, pearl white, grey, and black), and fits in a handbag. It’s a must-have accessory! Guys: Everyone will envy you! All of your friends, family members, and complete strangers will want one once they see your Eee.
9. Linux. Need I say more? OK, I will elaborate, since you asked. Linux is zippy and lacks the cumbersome qualities of Windows. From what I’ve read, it’s also less vulnerable to viruses. (Not sure of this, but it sounds good.) Windows fanatics, no worries. You can run Windows (stripped-down, as I understand it) on Eee.
8. It is small (size of dvd case, plus a little girth) making it a traveller’s or commuter’s instant companion.
7. It has a really long cord on the charger unit, which is both good and bad. Good because it’s handy for hard-to-reach outlets, and bad because the cord is a bit unruly to bundle up.
6. There are three USB ports, which is more than sufficient. Right? With a thumb drive, you are set to work with docs or jpgs to your delight!
5. The price. I paid $299 plus tax for mine on Amazon. I figured, hey, if it’s stolen by some unruly thug while traveling, I’m not out the $700 I paid for my Averatec dinosaur laptop.
4. Penguin racing (game where you try to collect herring as your penguin slides on its belly down a slalom ski course) is a riot, especially after a glass of wine. OK, I’m joking. Sort of. On a more serious note, did I mention that it has an SD card slot. This came in handy to download picts onto my computer during my trip. Eee comes loaded with a picture viewer that I used to upload photos to Flickr. Kinda slow, but it worked. The best part was that I was able to make back-up copies of my picts onto my thumb drive.
3. Built-in wifi. Plus, it has an ethernet port, so it is super web-friendly!
2. It boots up in about 10 seconds. My Averatec takes about 25 seconds. Go figure!
1. Did I mention how light it is? It’s less than 1 kilogram! (That’s what the box says.) OK, for non-metric folk, I think that’s roughly 2 pounds. Transportability is its number one feature, at least for me.
Wine~n~Trip 
ubuntucat Said:
on July 17, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Loving my Eee as well.
I will say, though, that the version of Linux (Xandros) that comes with it isn’t the most securely designed. So, despite the fact that there aren’t any Linux viruses in the wild, if there were, the Linux that comes with the Eee would be a prime target, since it allows the user to escalate any command to root (system-wide) privileges without password authentication.
I’m running Ubuntu on mine and am quite happy with it. The major downside is the slow boot time. That’s cool you get 10 seconds with Xandros. When I was running Xandros, I had about a 24-second boot time. Now, with Ubuntu, it’s over a minute.