Lilula

Coming soon.

EEE! I’m In Love!

21February2008

Those of you who have been subject to my squeeing over my new Asus EEE PC are probably familiar with what I’m going to say in this blog entry. However those of you who are not sure what I’m talking about walk with me. I will teach you the ways of the ultra mobile PC young grasshopper.

My fascination for ultra mobile PC’s began a year or two back. I had grown tired of lugging my old heavy laptop around at university since I had to carry it most of the time from building to building, to the pub, around the town centre - you get the point. My shoulders would be raw by the end of the day, often bruised and sore. So imagine my delight when I heard that there was such a thing as laptops specifically designed for weaklings such as myself.

I started with a Toshiba convertible tablet PC. Sure it was light, useful and impressive as hell with it’s tablet screen but it was also slow, buggy and temperamental. It served well as a tablet, but not for much else. It still felt bulky in the majority of my bags and was heavy alongside textbooks and the various bits of shrapnel I carry around.

Just before Christmas I started looking for a new laptop mainly because the Toshiba had a fracking melt down. Being the poor student that I am, I was disheartened at the high prices for the now ever so desirable ultra mobile PC’s. I just wanted something portable that could process documents and surf the internet without having to pay an extortionate amount or resort to getting a Blackberry and risk looking like an anal business orientated individual before I graduate.

That’s when I stumbled upon the Asus EEE PC. At first I tossed it aside thinking “512MB RAM and 4-8GB memory? I don’t think so!” On top of that the operating system was unfamiliar and even though it was cheap I was risking a lot in buying a gadget that could potentially fail to meet my needs. That was before I started looking into the rave reviews. Most websites will contain a star rating of five out of five for the Asus, with the lowest I’ve seen at about four and a half stars out of five from an average of about two hundred customers. That’s enough to even get the little ol’ pessimist in me interested.

Being laptop-less was also having a profound effect on my studies - I couldn’t do any work at university unless I used a Mac or PC and even then it was impersonal and tiring to be sat in the same area all day. So going on my gut instinct (which has failed me in the past) I went ahead and bought a white Asus from Expansy’s. Let’s go through all the specs:

The webcam is seriously impressive. I thought it was going to have the same sort of quality as a mobile phone camera, but it catches light incredibly well (even in the dark) and the sharpness of the videos and photos I’ve taken do not look like the work of a 0.3 MP camera. I would put some up here for you to see, but I’m feeling lazy so they’ll only be published on popular demand :D

It’s also incredibly fast. Linux boots up in under minute, and hasn’t frozen at all. I can easily run two or three programs at a time without it lagging which is a plus. I haven’t had the chance to run more applications at one time - not that I would need to anyway! The applications are also incredibly useful and create documents (word processing files, presentations and spreadsheets) compatible with Macs and PC’s. You can’t imagine how useful this is to me when I have to constantly interchange between the two.

Not to mention all the other little goodies that come with the laptop. It comes with free anti-virus, games (solitaire, Tetris, a Linux version of Bubble Trouble), a media player compatible with loads of files, instant links to useful websites, Thunderbird, Firefox, a couple of paint programs, educational programs (which I aren’t all that useful to me - but they are pretty nifty) and plenty more. How they crammed it all in I’ll never know.

I swear the battery has lasted me more than three hours. I would be so bold as to say it’s lasted me up to around four or even five hours but maybe that’s because it’s brand new and I’m still incredibly infatuated with it. Not that three hours is a problem since most of my lectures only last around two.

The internet runs as quickly as the network it connects to. No surprise there. The only problem is that it doesn’t support WPA2 encryption, which is what the wireless at university has. I’m waiting for a hack or patch to become available since it would be useful to connect to the university internet! Apart from that I’m loving that I can chat on Skype. I’m waiting for another patch on that so that I can do webcam chat since it’s not supported at the moment.

Having a 4GB hard drive has not been as troublesome as I thought it would be. So far I have a handful of MP3’s, quite a few vidoes, photographs and fairly large documents floating around in the Asus and still have plenty of space. We’re so used to getting devices with 100GB+ that I think we’ve forgotten just how large just 1GB is. I’m not using the Asus as a desktop replacement - neither would I recommend that anyone use it for that purpose - so 4GB is just fine to keep a few lectures notes, essays and music on. Should it ever present a problem I could upgrade the hard drive.

Now for the beauty of this little laptop - it weighs less than a bag of flour. Go to your kitchen right now and pick up your average 1.5kg bag of flour, then say to yourself “An Asus EEE PC weighs considerably less than this.” It’s only slightly heavier than a Nintendo DS. I kid you not. It’s an absolute dream carrying it around. I can even fit it into my smaller bags. It’s also robust but I’m not about to go test it by using it as a rugby ball.

Of course the Asus probably isn’t for everyone. It suits my needs very well, and it would also suit your needs if you’re a commuter who likes to travel light, a student at school, college or university, a parent who wants to introduce their children to technology without spending a fortune or a gadget enthusiast. It’s probably the only highly capable and potent ultra mobile PC to be sold for such a low price - I’d highly recommend it.

Comments are off
Subscribe