On Monday of this week I went to Dick Smith Electronics and bought an EeePc (that in itself was quite funny as the sales droid proceeded to ex-plain in words of one syl-la-ble that this was-n’t a real com-pu-ter but was really a toy ma-dam. Thanks but I know what it is).
The EeePc is a 7 inch screened laptop with a 900MHz processor, 512MB of ram and a 4GB (2GB available as well and an 8GB model is one the way) solid state hard drive. It has three USB ports, an SD card reader, a VGA port for an external LCD display (has anyone tried a projector? It’s on the task list for tomorrow), microphone and headphone sockets and an integrated webcam. It has wireless and ethernet connections and software to make the most of all of its features. It runs Xandros flavoured Linux (although Windows XP is a supported option) and comes in black or white (Asus are planning to offer other colours shortly) and I got the black one. It’s very cool.
I took the EeePc with me to Rotorua with the intention of trying it out for the few days that I was away from home. I would have dearly loved to have it as my only laptop whilst away, however something stopped me. Battery life. My super-duper pimped out HP6710b routinely gives me 2-3 hours of battery life. Add in the extended battery and turn doen every setting in sight and I can double that and get six hours of decent usage. My first forays into EeePc-dom weren’t looking good in the battery department. At first unplugged sessions gave me well under two hours battery life (admittedly with wireless on, SD and USB plugged in).
During the conference I discovered that I could use the EeePc quite easily with the screen brightness turned right down. I also discovered that I could survive without wireless when I was taking notes (actually there were moments when I was forced to cope without wireless but that was adifferent matter all together!). After a day I took my 4GB SD card out. I don’t know if that helped or not. Connecting via wireless is reasonably easy however it annoys me that I have to re-enter the WPA key everything I reconnect to my home network. I’ll have to look out for a fix for that. Potentially that could be difficult for some users.
When you first turn on the EeePc you are faced with a set of tabbed pages that offer easy access to many applications. These tabs are labelled Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings and Favourites and make it really easy to get your favourite applications. The Internet tab gives you Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype and Messenger (Pidgin for multiple accounts) and quick links to iGoogle, Google Docs, a world clock and Internet Radio. The Work tab offers OpenOffice2.0 applications and Adobe Reader. There is also a dictionary and a file manager. Learn has a variety of educational programmes and in Play you can access some games and the various media managers and webcam software. Settings allows you to customise the machine – but not much.
I found the tabbed interface to be a little restrictive. However, I think that the very thing that limited me could be powerful for children and their busy teachers. It’s really easy to find the applications that you want – although they are not labelled by their correct titles in all cases.
Shortly after I got my hands on the laptop I went searching around the web to find out more about it. There is a fantastic wiki and a host of user sites and pages with all sorts of useful tips and hacks. The first thing that I did was activate full desktop mode. In this mode you get a very useful desktop – but in miniature. And this is where the EeePC becomes really useful. In this mode you get more choices and are able to access some of the deeper stuff. For example, it’s possible to use any one of several terminal programmes instead of the default Konsole. And once inside terminal mode you can use some long forgotten DOS and Linux wizardry to find out and do more stuff.
The EeePc is very small and it’s a little difficult to balance it on your knee. I found that it is most comfortable to use on a table or on a platform on your knee. If you plug in an external drive (USB key or external drive) it all feels very precarious unless its sitting on a table. I can report that all of my USB keys and external hard drives were recognised and mounted by the file system. It’s also possible to plug in a USB mouse and keyboard and with an LCD monitor as well you have a fully fledged internet or word processing desktop.
Speaking of word processing – I couldn’t on the EeePc. I could take notes but if I went too fast my large clumsy fingers fumbled on the small keys and I made a lot of errors. Of course a week of continued effort could change that! On the other hand that could mean that the computer is ideal for a child to use. We’ll be trying that out shortly. I’ll report on the results.
Useful links
EeeUser.com and Wiki
Finally, how this website renders under Firefox on the EeePc
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