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.

Anyway, the Eee Box EB202 with Red Flag Linux installed has 1GB of RAM, a 160Gb hard drive, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Ethernet, a 1.6 GHz intel Atom N270 processor, and it also comes with a mouse and keyboard. According to Liliputing, “Newegg is selling the nettop for $219.99, but after a $30 mail-in rebate the price drops to $189.99 plus free shipping.”

Personally, I’m surprised that Asus went with Red Flag Linux instead of, you know, much more capable Linux distros such as Ubuntu. But then replacing the OS should be easy enough for us, right?

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.

According to Liliputing:

It’s not particularly surprising that most people would rather use a full time laptop for some or many tasks than one that was designed to be low cost and ultraportable. What’s a bit more surprising to me is the implication that 45% of consumers do think that netbooks are replacements for traditional laptops — indicating that many people just don’t need a big screen or a powerful processor to meet most of their computing needs.

The PriceGrabber study defined netbooks as machines with screens smaller than 11 inches and price tags lower than $500, which seems about right to me.

The survey also points out something that’s been pretty clear for the last year or two: The increasing demand for cheap netbooks has led to a drop in the overall prices for computers. PriceGrabber.com reports that the average cost of a laptop in its directory dropped from $808 in December 2008 to $645 in December, 2009.

What do you guys think? Did you replace your laptop with a netbook or did you purchase a netbook so you can be even more portable?

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.

More from Engadget:

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.

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.

I was actually looking at the Eee Keyboard as a possible nettop. It’s small, it has specs that aren’t really cutting edge, but are good enough for Windows XP or Windows 7 Home Basic. As for the 16 to 32GB storage space, I was thinking of installing a networked hard drive anyway, so it’s not much of a problem (that means I’ll be stuck with Windows XP Professional though). Anyway, I did hear it was going to be out this February, so I was eagerly waiting for it. As far as I can remember, the original price for the Eee keyboard was going to be sub-$300, so it’s not going to be much of a big deal. Also, have I mentioned how much I love Asus products? (Clue: this blog’s URL gives the answer away.)

And then the news comes out: it’s going to cost somewhere between $500 and $600. What the heck, Asus? This is a bit too pricey for a nettop running yesterday’s specs. You guys are even making dual-core nettops that aren’t even near that price range.

For the curious, the Eee Keyboard has a previous generation Intel Atom N270 (1.6 GHz) processor, a single DIMM slot, 1GB of DDR2 memory with no accessible way to upgrade to 2 GB. Storage options are a 16GB and 32GB SSD. There’s the touch screen, but it’s definitely not worth $500, Asus.

Did Asus bite off more than they can chew on this one that they had to actually double the price before launch? You tell me.

I finally went through with something I was planning a few months back. I installed a Linux distro on my Asus Eee PC 701. Actually, the main reason I didn’t push thru with installing Linux is that I didn’t want to leave the comfort of a Windows installation. I know there are a lot of Linux fanboys among you readers, but I really depend on Windows a lot and I really can’t afford turning Linux into my main operating system.

Once I was able to get my hands on a brand-new laptop, I didn’t hesitate removing the Windows XP installation on my Asus Eee PC so I can put Jolicloud on it. As I have the only the 4gb Eee PC, I went for the Pro Install. I downloaded a Jolicloud ISO and was able to quickly mount it on a flash drive. The Jolicloud website has the easiest instructions, and because of that I was able to get Jolicloud up and running on my mini laptop in no time.

Jolicloud Pre-Beta’s interface does not differ significantly from Ubuntu Netbook Remix. In fact, save for a couple of shade changes, it’s exactly Ubuntu Netbook Remix. But the biggest difference would be the installation process. Just like the app store on an iPhone or iPod touch, you’d get to an App Directory and all you need to do to install them would be to click on the install button, and the app of your choice would be downloaded and installed immediately.

The apps available on the directory are a bit of a mixed bag. We’d get apps like Pidgin and Google Chrome, which are must-have programs to install on any computer, regardless of operating system. I saw an app for Twitter, and I promptly installed it. I was hoping for a TweetDeck-like experience where Tweets are integrated into the Jolicloud UI, but I only got a Mozilla Prism window leading to the Twitter website. Meh.

I’d be satisfied with Jolicloud if the audio didn’t keep on disappearing on me during random intervals. I can’t find anything anywhere that can help me out with that issue. Also, the fact that I never once upgraded the RAM on my Eee PC (I’m holding on at 512mb!) made running Jolicloud a not-so-pleasurable experience. Everything is choppy and lag time is a bit huge. Ok, I know it’s my blasted 701’s fault more than anything else, so I’m giving Jolicloud the benefit of a doubt here.

The audio problem’s a really big pet peeve though. Restarting my Eee PC doesn’t guarantee the audio will go back – in fact it took around three to four restarts just to get it back, which is annoying. I’ll try my luck with CrunchBang Lite one of these days.

Now, installing it (on the 901 at least) is a breeze, because you can just use the built-in screwdriver to open your 901’s guts and remove the current 4GB SSD. Putting it back in would be the easiest thing in the world I would presume. Well, according to Test Freaks, it’ll just take two screws, and then we’re ready to go.

But why upgrade the SSD in the first place? 4GB obviously isn’t enough to do anything. I practically do most everything on my Eee 701, and dealing with 4GB is a pain in the neck. 64 gigabytes gives you more leeway with space. And apparently, the stock SSD is sluggish.

According to Test Freaks,

The SSD that comes with the EEEPC is slow as molasses, even running the ASUS Linux operating system. For whatever reason automatic update is turned on and when you power up the EEEPC it will start to download updates even if you don’t need them, and even if they aren’t for that particular model of EEEPC. There’s also really no way to delete the updates either, at least not an easy way. So when all of this happens the system bogs down to the point that you’re waiting upwards of 30 seconds sometimes for the system to respond because there’s just no more room on the SSD.

And after installation of the SSD, you can go and put XP on your Eee 901. And benchmarks will prove that you can turn your Eee PC into an actual workhorse. Now if only the SSDs of Eee 701s are screwed-in as well as opposed to soldered. Meh.

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.

Anyway, to try out Google Chrome OS on your Eee PC, you need to download the .ISO file first via this torrent. Or you can even download it directly here. It’s archived in .BZ2 format, so you probably need 7-Zip if your OS can’t handle it natively.

There’s a caveat, though. TechCrunch warns that they didn’t make the .ISO themselves, and it’s possible that this particular build may have been modified to send a hacker your Google account information. However, it’s unlikely.

Then it’s time to download and install VirtualBox. Once you get VirtualBox running, click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. Go through the New Virtual Machine Wizard. You can title the OS whatever name you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version.

Just finish up the wizard, load the Chrome OS ISO into your virtual machine, and you’d be able to run Chrome OS beautifully (well, not exactly since we’re talking about a virtual machine here).

I’m going to try this out soon on my Eee PC, so stay tuned, sports fans!

[via]

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?

He got a model with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, and a 13.3 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display and Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics.

The Asus UL30A with Intel integrated graphics gets a higher Windows performance score (3.9).

Here is the unboxing video, by the way: