Because geek is cool and clever

Good things, small packages. True? February 29, 2008

You can’t really call the EeePC from Asus a laptop unless you’re in possession of a particularly small lap.

This diminutive notebook computer isn’t much bigger than a paperback and yet manages to sport a solid, rugged build quality that could easily see it thrown in and out of a bag on a daily basis.

It’s all solid state so rather than a traditional hard disk drive it stores all its data on flash memory chips which helps allow it to boast a battery life of about three and a half hours.

Most incredibly of all, you can pick one up for about £200.
So is it worth it?

It comes with a preinstalled version of Linux, the free operating system. Not paying a fat fee to Microsoft certainly brings the price down and it’s easy enough to use but for the sake of my test I installed the familiar XP on it and handed it Mollie, my ten year old daughter, who put it through its paces for a week.

Here’s her personal verdict.

The EeePC’s keys are small so they are great for children but for people with bigger fingers it might be hard because they could press the wrong button.

When it is switched off the screen looks bigger than it actually is because of the black speakers either side of it and it can be hard to find a picture to use as wallpaper because of the odd rectangular shape of the screen.

On the start menu you cannot see all the icons because it doesn’t stretch as far as it does on a normal computer.

The style of this laptop is very uncomplicated with a white cover, plain keys, and a straightforward layout.

I took it to my friend’s house who thought it looked cool but found the keys hard to use because she is fast at typing, but for me I could imagine writing a long essay on it because I have small hands and don’t type as quickly.

In conclusion, the EeePC is interesting because it is so cheap, compact and light, making it very easy to carry around but I prefer my bigger laptop so I don’t want to swap!

Technical specifications:

The EeePC comes with a reasonably impressive set of specs, including:
A 900MHz Intel Celeron processor
512MB RAM
4GB Flash memory

It has three USB ports, a built in camera and microphone and is 802.11b/g wireless capable.

You’ll notice the lack of a hard drive. That’s because the EeePC stores everything (software, files and documents) on solid state memory – and it comes with a fixed 4GB – not exactly colossal by today’s standards. To make matters worse, almost half of that 4GB is already taken up by the operating system so if you’re planning to install a lot of software of save lots of files you will need to invest in extra storage – whether it be in the form of an external USB hard drive (which kind of defeats the portability point) or, more like, an SD memory card that can sit in the computers dedicated card reader.

SD cards have dropped dramatically in price over recent years so you could buy a 4GB card and double machine’s storage capacity for under £15.

Alternatively, of course, there are USB pen drives which are also cheap and plentiful.

Next to an Apple MacBook Pro, the EeePC shows off its diminutive dimensions

In order to make Mollie feel as comfortable with hers as I could, I sold my soul to the devil and installed Windows XP on my EeePC. As there’s no CD or DVD drive this requires using either an external disc drive or, as I did, copying all the files from the XP disc onto a USB drive. It’s a relatively simple process if you want to do this and the web is full of step by step guides.

All in all I like the EeePC as much for its novelty as anything else. XP is coming off and I shall be installing Ubuntu so that I’ve got something to tinker with. I can’t see myself actually using the thing in any real work or personal capacity as it’s just too small. But I shall be showing it off to anyone with a passing interest in technology because it gains plentiful wow points.