My new eee PC

I’ve always secretly wanted a laptop, however, resented their high prices, over powered specs, and bulky sizes. So when I learned ASUS (I bought my motherboard for my low-end small-form-factor desktop from them) has a new line of laptops called the Eee PCs, I got curious.

The Eee PC is a line of ultra-portable low end laptops that range from $300-$600 CAD. After further investigation I figured I didn’t want to go for the crippled 2G model (even though it has more colour options), since I found out that they give you a weakened processor and very little hard drive space (just enough for the OS and apps), however the high end 900 series and 8Gs were out of my ideal range ($550-$600). So I looked between the 4G and 4G Surf.

The only differences are that the surf doesn’t have the 0.3 MP webcam and has a 4400 mAh battery as opposed to a 5200 mAh battery (and the surf has no hard reset button). The price difference is also $50. I decided upon the Surf since I couldn’t justify the junky sounding webcam and may spring for a larger battery later.

However, when I got to memory express (a local retailer who had these babies in stock), they had a 4G and 4G surf on clearance! I stuck with the surf and saved an extra $60. So for $289.95 and tax I got my new laptop. I avoided the 4G since it was the XP version, and I wanted to try out the custom Linux install it came with.

The reviews online cover the laptop pretty well. I have to say that the keyboard isn’t that bad, mainly since I only type with two or three fingers per hand anyway, so the size isn’t that bad. The resolution is a bit rough to work with, however, it is enough to fit the width of Facebook. I did download the littlefox theme for firefox though so that I could gain a little space on the web. The sound is okay, and I wouldn’t expect anything better. Overall the system is responsive, although you can easily bog down the 512 MB of ram pretty quickly. The extra advantage of the 4G is that it supposedly has upgradeable ram (which I may investigate in the future).

My plan now is to use google documents, gmail, and google reader to essentially integrate the majority of my computer work online at one source.

So if you’re looking for a small (it’s slightly bigger than a DVD case and weighs only a kg) and cheap laptop the ASUS Eee PC is a pretty sweet deal (note that the 900 series gets a larger screen and a better touchpad).

I also bought another gig of ram for my desktop (total of 2 GB now), which makes Vista run so smoothly.