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Noble losers - vintage before their time

R

RickNel

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 24, 2009
Messages
641
Location
Canberra, Australia
There's a category of personal computing products that have a relatively short life in the market, but start significant trends that end up making them obsolete.

Three examples might be the Palm Pilot, the Blackberry, and the Asus EeePC. They each pioneered aspects of the trend towards convergence of personal computing, network computing, and mobile communications. They are all now considered old hat.

These days I limit my scavenging by only visiting the local recycling centre when I have a full load of garden waste to contribute. This last time, in return for a trailer-load, I picked up an Asus EeePC 701SD (2007) for $10. It was in original box and looked like it had never been used. Probably an unwanted gift or an impulse-buy soon regretted.

It had a flaky WiFi driver and the limited Xandros OS, but I was surprised what a good hardware package it had - 3 USB ports, RJ45, RJ11, VGA, WiFi, 8Gb PCI SSD 1Gb SDO RAM and SD card slot.

ASUS have already deleted their support and download site for it, but I've got it humming along with an Ubuntu Netbook Remix installation and also a current Puppy Linux. It's much quicker than my more modern HP netbooks that have nominally faster processors but are weighed down with more overheads.

There's no doubt the (brief) success of the EeePC kicked off the rush to ultra-portability by the major developers, and to the tablet fad.

I never had a new EeePC, but I'm finding it a handy device for away-from-desk when I want proper keyboard, open-standards operating system, standard connectivity, and a rugged self-contained shell. All those factors are compromised with a touch-screen tablet. The $10 price was good, too.

The EeePC is considered a joke by many these days - forum responders like to call it a "toy". I wonder what other "obsolete" innovations are being unjustly overlooked.

Rick
 
Well, I think that goes for almost any netbook, starting with the Psion. Mostly damned because they were underpowered, CPU-wise--Atom, ARM, even MIPS. Toward the end, some went for insanely cheap as retailers cleared their inventories.

Now, of course, we have tablets...
 
I'm actually typing this on an Eee 904HA. It served me well as a workable, low-cost daily driver for three years running Windows XP, and has followed up with a second life as a testbed system for alternative operating systems - currently it's running Debian 7. What's really impressed me about it is how durable the damn thing is - I had it fall off the roof of my car on a freeway on-ramp at fifteen miles per hour and come out with only a bit of scuffed or gouged plastic, and after three years of regular use and three years of sporadic use, the only things that are seriously showing their age are the moving parts - if I felt like buying a replacement keyboard and found a way to clean the switches for the touchpad buttons, I could probably get another three years out of it yet. Even the hinge works almost like new, and that's always the first thing to go on laptops. It was never that performant and it struggles to choke along if I try to use a web browser without NoScript enabled, but honestly I'm amazed by how much I really did get for the money.
 
I've got a close cousin to that EEE in the form of an original Acer AspireRevo. It's like Acer looked at the EEE and went "oh come ON, we can do better than that". It's collecting dust right now, but for a good three or so years it was my media center machine since all I needed it to handle was Hulu, Netflix, and browsing when friends came over. I also used it with my SKYPE eeguru phone that doesn't have drivers for anything newer than XP when I went "spin your own" VOIP and told the phone companies where to stick it, and as my print server / scanning station.

The AspireRevo I have:
1.6ghz Atom 230
nVidia ION graphics (fancy way of saying 9400m)
2 gigs RAM
160 gig HDD (WD Caviar Blue)

It was only with recent changes in how NetFlux and Screwloo works that I retired it (thanks again HTML ****ING 5!) -- well, that and the realization I had actually gone a bit too overboard on my workstation rig in both computing power and power consumption.

Four times since I've retired it I've pulled it off the shelf as a stopgap for when a friend finds themselves with a busted computer. They're handy to have around on that count alone. It certainly gets more use than my MSI Wind U123 netbook that right now is gathering dust in the back of my sock drawer next to the Geode Thin Client, Newton, half dozen crApple hockey pucks, and... oh hey, is that where my Atari Portfolio got to?

SIDE NOTE, when people find out you collect vintage systems, you ever end up being given stuff that you're like... eh, I'll pass? Next person that tries to bring me a G3 fishbowl or toilet seat; AND WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS BLUEBERRY?
 
Hi all,

I am using a Dell version of the mini-laptop form (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) as a Drivewire host for my Color Computer. It runs Windows XP Home, so it's fully capable for going online and acquiring disk images, and the small form factor does not take up a lot of room on the desktop where I have my stuff all located. This machine happens to be one of my machines that works well with a USB-to-RS-232 dongle, so that has been useful as I have used it as a remote disk device with ADT Pro for my Apple IIc+ and Apple IIGS, also.

smp
 
Ricknel, they DO have a support page for that poor little thing. Those things are good. I once had the Dell equivalent, an inspiron mini1018 with 7 starter. Hardware wise it was pretty good, but flimsy as hell. There things were only designed for one thing, and that was to surf the net. That they did well, but not much else. My old HP Pavilion ZE5155 has more power, and it's a few years older.
 
I have one of the later eee pcs, the 1015PE. I maxed out the ram to 2GB, and put in a SSD. It runs arch linux and boots super quick. I use it every day to surf the net from the couch. I do a lot of stuff for work over ssh, so the eee works great for that too. The company gave me a huge macbook to use, but I don't like traveling with something so bulky and a theft target. No one will steal the eee.
 
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