Bringing an Asus Eee PC around is really a huge convenience. Our favorite miniscule mini-laptop started this whole netbook thing. With the dawn of these affordable and slightly underpowered and undersized notebooks, everyone suddenly decided to take this whole portable computing thing seriously. I don’t think I’ve seen that many laptop or netbook toting people before, and that’s a good thing.
And that’s the keyword here. Portable. As much as we want to bring our computers with us everywhere we go, there’s a bit of a limitation with carrying our laptops around – how in blue blazes are going to print our documents when needed?
Of course we can upload our files to dropbox, our webmail accounts, or some other cloud storage solution, and go to the nearest internet café to have it printed. And we all know that internet cafés aren’t available everywhere. We may not even have an internet connection – wifi, 3g or otherwise – available to use for uploading our Word documents.
This is why some people opt to buying a portable printer so they can print almost anywhere they want. Of course, it means that they’ll have to bring extra stuff like the printer, paper, and, in some cases, inkjet cartridges. I doubt portable printer owners would bring laser printer toner cartridges around because that would be ridiculous – there are no portable laser printers just yet.
Of course, being portable, these printers would be subject to a few corners cut here and there to ensure that it’ll be light and compact enough to carry around anywhere. You’d lose some features like duplex printing, the clarity of printouts used with Brother printer toner cartidges, and of course I doubt you’d be able to use these gadgets for heavy-duty printing. However, if you need to have hard copies of your documents handy, it won’t hurt to carry one of these babies along with your Asus Eee PC.
I’ve been using the Eee PC 701 for almost two years now, and it’s been pretty neat. It’s super portable, and the Windows XP installation has been pretty good to me.
Well, until recently. Sometime after Mozilla rolled out Firefox 3.5, I’ve been getting nothing but constant crashes out of my Eee PC. Switching to Chrome and later Opera helped a bit, but I’ve pretty much lost the ability to multitask. Imagine: I’m doing an article on my Eee PC and I have my IM programs running on my Nokia E63; sometimes I even torrent via my phone.
So I defragged, ran an antispyware and virus scan, and removed a lot of crap from the registry, and somehow XP seems to have stabilized. Still can’t get Firefox to work, though. I might downgrade to FF 2.5. I’m sticking with XP prolly for an extra week or two, but the moment I get another major crash as I write in My Asus Eee PC, I’m switching asap to Crunchbang Lite.
What do you guys think? Do you have any other OS recommendations?
Okay, I’ve said time and again that I am not impressed with Google’s Chrome OS, but I guess I need to try it out hands-on before I pass my final judgment on the new Linux distro.
Fortunately, TechCrunch has created a guide to install Google Chrome OS on your Eee PC. Well, actually, it’s not a real installation because it requires a virtual machine. I don’t think there’s actually a way to run and install the OS like any other traditional Linux distro, and because of the cloud nature of Chrome OS, I don’t even think we should even attempt installing it. More »
I was looking for a nice, cheap nettop to replace my five-year old desktop. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it really is dated and sluggish. And since I use my laptop as my primary computer, the nettop would actually just serve as a secondary computer for my family members who just surf the net, do projects on the word processor, play games on Facebook and the occasional Popcap game, and require nothing else from their computers. More »
That guy in the Asus commercial isn’t very imaginative. If I had 8 hours of battery life, I’d go to my secret no electricity lair and plot world domination. What would you do?
Since the dawn of the Eee, there have been a ton of netbooks launched by other brands, like the HP Mini Note, Asus Aspire one, MSI Wind. And from reviews I’ve read, a lot are praising the WIND for its value, the Aspire one for its low price, and the Mini Note for its sexy looks. Of course, the Eee 901 gets its praise for its long battery life, too (at the default configuration), at about 6-8 hours.
But what I really like about having an Eee is the community. Won’t you think so, too?
Judging from how active the EeeUser forum is, the community love that the Eee has can’t be beat. I guess that’s one advantage of the Eee’s being the first of its kind. It did break barriers. And the community support just grew and grew.
Anyone here remember the first time the Eee PC came out? Yeah, it was a glorious time. It was the birth of the netbook, and we all had a grand time trying to figure out what to do with the 7-inch netbook. Anyone remember the Xandros Linux that came with it? Yeah, it wasn’t so great. Granted, that was my first extensive experience with Linux and I really learned a lot from it, but man, was that netbook-flavored Linux distro so not ready for primetime.
Anyway, Asus has since then avoided releasing anything with Linux preinstalled and has since gone the route of Windows XP – and recently Windows 7 – on its Eee PC line, be it netbooks or nettops. But at Newegg, they are selling an Eee PC EB202 nettop mysteriously preinstalled with Red Flag Linux. Red Flag Linux by the way is designed to look a lot like Windows XP, and is looking like the de facto Linux OS used in China. Apparently, even internet cafes are being forced to switch to Red Flag Linux even though they own legitimately-licensed Windows XP installs. More »
If you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of computing power for portability, I’m pretty sure you’re looking at netbooks like the Asus Eee PC as a replacement for your aging laptop. Now I’m wondering if you were able to get the netbook, or if you went ahead and got the full-featured laptop instead. You see, according to a survey by PriceGrabber.com, 55% of consumers think netbooks complements traditional laptops rather than replacing them. More »
We’ve all heard about the Asus Eee Box EB1501 before, but now there’s an unboxing video floating all around the net. You see, I’ve been looking for a great desktop computer that can replace my battered 7 year old machine, and it looks like the Eee Box EB1501 is a good contender. It’s got pretty good specs, and to top it off, it’s relatively cheap.
In case you don’t remember, the Asus Eee Box EB1501 is a tiny desktop computer that sports a dual core Atom 330 processor, NVIDIA ION graphics and a slot-loading disc drive. The specs of this nettop are: 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, 6 USB ports, HDMI, eSATA, and S/PDIF ports. The disc drive is a DVD burner. There are versions of the Asus Eee Box EB1501 that actually has a Bluray drive in place of the DVD drive. I’d like to get my hands on one of those.
With that fancy disc drive, NVIDIA Ion under the hood, and considerable aesthetic improvements, the Eee Box EB1501 has seemingly little to do with the Asus Eee Box of yore. So, is it as stunning in person as it is on paper? The folks at Blogeee.net have unwrapped the thing and stood it on its fancy metal stand, and they seem to be digging it — of course, their impressions are written in French, so we can never be entirely sure. Now if only Asus could work in an internal Blu-ray drive we’d be set!
Now you can watch the unboxing video below:
The Asus Eee Box EB1501 comes with Windows 7 Home Premium, and it costs around $479.
