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Asus Eee PC

If you ever break your LCD screen, it's end of the line. I have yet to find one place that sells replacement panels.
 
What OS did you slap on it? They do look like neat little machines. I know a company that outfits their field techs with them for wireless net installs in rural areas, the guys there seem to think they're great.
 
My girlfriend has one. The keyboard is way to small for me. But otherwise it is nice.

The LCD must be replaceable as I've seen people put touch sensitive panels in them. Perhaps its not an easy switch, but possible.
 
I have a 700 something model which I use very infrequently. Miniature keyboard yes, but that is part of the package. I only wish I had spent the money on a 900 model with the somewhat larger screen. Mine runs Windows XP Light or whatever it is called, a custom made installation not supported by Microsoft. At least it fits within the 4 GB of SSD memory. I also have upgraded RAM from 512MB to 2GB, which may be a necessity to run Windows XP.

In order to make this topic a little less brand centric, I propose netbooks in general could be discussed. I'm feeling some of the competitors going for 9" then 10" screens, conventional hard drives and higher priced somewhat are missing the target. Or perhaps they're finding other customer groups than the very first Eee PCs did. If you want a really light computer that is relatively insensitive to bumps, larger screens and regular HDDs don't seem to make sense to me.
 
The Acer One or whatever it is called is a good buy too. They started putting regular laptop hard drives in them. Makes for about 2 hours of battery life instead of 3 for the ssd drive.

Once again, my hoard of 2002-2003 laptops is still working just fine. In fact, 2002 Compaq 3045US with 1GB of ram, running Windows 7 since the day the beta hit the streets, is in use at the very second. Anyway, with the working hoard, I can't rationalize even $349 for yet another laptop or netbook.

I was looking at the Acer models earlier tonight. Finally closed out all the webpages when reality settled in.
 
I can definitely recommend the Acer Aspire One. The keyboard is actually pretty good and, seeing as it does everything I want to do on the move, I don't need to lug a full-size laptop around. I picked one up with a 120GB hard disk and battery life is indeed about 2 hours. There is a larger capacity battery too, but I believe it's on the expensive side.

I actually went out looking for the Linux version (normally about $50 cheaper than the XP one) but the store only had the Windows version left. When I said I could just as well pick up a Linux one around the corner, the salesman was quick to sell me the XP laptop at the Linux price ;-) So I now have it dual-booting with Xubuntu quite nicely.
 
I have a 700 something model which I use very infrequently. Miniature keyboard yes, but that is part of the package. I only wish I had spent the money on a 900 model with the somewhat larger screen. Mine runs Windows XP Light or whatever it is called, a custom made installation not supported by Microsoft. At least it fits within the 4 GB of SSD memory. I also have upgraded RAM from 512MB to 2GB, which may be a necessity to run Windows XP.

In order to make this topic a little less brand centric, I propose netbooks in general could be discussed. I'm feeling some of the competitors going for 9" then 10" screens, conventional hard drives and higher priced somewhat are missing the target. Or perhaps they're finding other customer groups than the very first Eee PCs did. If you want a really light computer that is relatively insensitive to bumps, larger screens and regular HDDs don't seem to make sense to me.

Umm... My desktop only has 1G of RAM and it runs Win XP. Used to have a half a gig and still run XP ;-)
 
Asus Eee 1000

Asus Eee 1000

I use the 1000 model at work for troubleshooting/testing wireless LAN. It's a good little machine that's easy to carry around and the batt life is great! I have Linux Ubuntu running on it.
 
XP will actually run on a P1 233MHZ MMX with 64Mb of RAM. Sloooow, but it works :D

I am very tempted by those little Eee PCs, what screen resolsutions are typical of those machines?



BG
 
XP with 512MB can be a pain if what you are doing requires a bit of memory.
In particular if you have virtually no hard disk space for a swap file. My XP installation with practically no applications except those built into the operating system takes about 3 GB out of the 4 GB total capacity. Then you want some space for temporary files, settings etc so the 2 GB RAM is handy to avoid using all of the remaining "hard disk" space for swap.

BG: I believe my 7" Eee PC has a resolution at 800x480 pixels in XP. There are two settings, 640x480 and 800x480. Some people are using tweaked drivers to get a higher, interpolated resolution but it is even less supported. The 9" ones should do a bit better.
 
This is slightly off topic. But I want to show off my favorite portable device:

IMG_2784.JPG

(the keytronic keyboard is just for reference)

It is a battery backed vt100 terminal, full size keyboard, built in modem, built in calendar software. Everything you need :)
 
Thanks Anders. I'll try to find out what the larger screens support, as I would struggle with anything less than 1024x768. I'm used to 1260x1024 now lol





BG
 
why Windows Carlsson??? It comes w/Linux.
Without starting a flame war, perhaps I'm not so impressed by various Linux dists as desktop operating systems? I once had a Debian distro installed on my PC. At one point I needed to update the software through the dselect mechanism, and it ended with my whole XFree86 installation got corrupted. Basically it was some window manager whose license had changed since the previous version, and instead of warning the user and keeping software breaking the GNU/FSF "seal", the update process outright removed it from my computer, making most of my Linux experience useless until I had figured out a way to get around it. Say what you want about Microsoft Windows, but as far as I know Windows Update would never remove legitimate software at own will just because the company who made it doesn't adhere to M$ own policies.
 
There is a flaw with Windows Update on my Dell Latitude C610 on XP that causes the touchpad to fail.

Forwhatever reason, it thinks my laptop has a touchscreen and then replaces the Synaptics touchpad (or generic PS/2 mouse driver) with a touch screen driver, rendering the whole mouse useless. I had to "Update" the driver and select standard PS/2 mouse by keyboard just to regain use of the touchpad again (I was mobile and didn't have an external USB mouse nearby).

Now THAT's a bug that's almost as bad as your linux experience. In my experience though, every OS has it's flaws and pro's.. Nothing is perfect.
 
I looked at both of those although I can't recall if I ever found a functional demo unit to actually play on of either which is a pain and kinda suspicious, but I think one of my parents bought one or they both bought some small equivalent system for travel purposes. I like the size, the keyboard may take some getting used to but I think I could get used to that, and admittedly a nice sub-notebook is handy many times.

The thing I still can't get over though is the lack of peripherals. Nobody has a floppy anymore (annoying, I don't feel like burning cds for every small task or for firmware updates on servers, etc), these have no optical drives (no cd/dvd) again an annoyance factor to me. 4GB drive has got to be fast but really I'd rather play with things that take more than that, the 120GB is more my taste but again now I have no output except USB so I'm trying to figure out what fun stuff I could use it for still, then at $300, it's just shy of me getting all those features for another $150 from about any cheap vendor so I'm torn.

Of course, I'm not using it for practical business (notepad and calendar/email) use. I want to surf the web and goof around, get on my wired or wireless lan, and the cooler feature I used to use all the time is output to the TV and watch videos from the network/computer. Interestingly I've gotten past that on my new christmas setup with a new tv and a used (to get all the features there used to be) PS3 and "tversity" where it can do live streaming of common avi format to flash so the ps3/xbox/wii can play it.
 
I remember when we "Won't ever need more than 640K of RAM". ;)

Now I have a computer with 32GB of RAM. Whew! Won't need any more of that. lol
 
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