Over Christmas 2007 I managed to get my grubby little hands on the fantastic Asus Eee PC (701). It's not a shocker to say that at £219 it's hardly a mobile gaming platform, however, with a footprint of around an A5 piece of paper and around a 3.5hr battery life, well, do you think I care?
It's a lovely little thing, I'll leave detailed specs, weights and blah for the reviews in the links below but to summarise, it comes with a 900MHz ULV Celeron and 512MB RAM.
It's really light, less than 1kg. Most interestingly there is no hard drive, the UK model (701) has 4GB internal storage, an SSD like a USB flash drive which means there are next to no moving parts (there's a fan obviously) and also it reduces the power drain. Now I know, 4GB, I need a 60GB MP3 player so what's 4GB? Well, for a start it has a SDHC card slot (that's SD High Capacity, up to 32GB as of Feb '08) and you're not meant to carry all your junk on here, it's a sub-sub-notebook, a better-than-PDA. You pop the OS and applications on the 4GB and I shove all my files, some music and photos on an 8GB SDHC card.
Really, how cool?
As you can see it has a rather small screen, it's 7 inches, with rather nice (for a laptop) stereo speakers at either side, not perfect for music but perfectly OK, just great for watching videos on, just like a portable DVD player.
That would be the next thing, no optical drive, rather clearly at its size it simply doesn't fit, and it would eat batteries. This does make software and OS installation more difficult. I guess I should say at this point that it comes with a customized version of Xandros Linux on it instead of some version of Microsoft Windows. The OS is very nice for a freebie, video player, music player, photo editor, OpenOffice, file manager, games, blah, blah. It's got a very childish interface, and it is designed for kids to be fair.
Personally I did find the Xandros Linux rather useless, it's a bit of a lash together, it uses part of Gnome, part of KDE and specially written Asus Eee programs. Overall it's kinda bloated requiring all of KDE and Gnome services to be running plus any apps you start on top of that. As well the default desktop environment is basically a few pages (like Internet, Games, Office) of big buttons. If you switch to the 'advanced' desktop it looks awful, having not been designed for the Eees resolution of 800x480.
Personally I did a little research and managed to install Windows XP (it comes with drivers on disc), AVG Anti-Virus, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC Media Player, Winamp, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice inside of 1GB of the 4GB internal. I can run all of Introversions games on it, as well as Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun and MSN (it has a built in webcam). I can even install and run Visual Studio 2005 for programming at Uni and it loads in just a few seconds!
I didn't feel like buying an external disc drive for installing Windows so I followed a guide on Eee PC Tutorials for installing from a USB memory stick. I also used the nLite program to reduce the install size. I cut the XP install size but two thirds by removing rubbish like other languages, drivers, help files and a few programs I don't use. Overall I am more than happy with this little thing, it's great for carrying around, it's got a good range for Wi-Fi (G 54Mbps standard) and a few USB2.0 ports. Obviously it's not for everyone but for browsing the internet and typing, listening to music and watching videos it's wonderful, if a little cramped on screen.
