Asus Eee Pc - a review

I do have a new netbook which I bought off eBay. The reason I was even looking to buy one is that the laptop was on the fritz and we were looking around in Best Buy and they had the little things everywhere. I tried to type on a couple of HP Minis and found that I made a dozen typographical errors due to the keyboard. Its not that the letters were small, its that the keys were not shaped well - they were flat and square like chicklets, so my fingers slid off. Also, the F and J keys barely had any raised dashes to help your fingers find the home position. Then I tried the Asus, and I could type a whole lot better. The screens, though small, were amazingly clear and readable, and I really loved the idea of carrying around a mini laptop rather than my bigger heavy Dell Latitude CPx which takes a full 10 minutes to boot up ubuntu.

A note on Linux. As far as operating systems go, we don't have too much choice. We can have the evil conglomerate that is run by Bill Gates deciding your every move. It is ubiquitous, its pricey, it is full of security leaks that they are only finally closing. I would never condone computer viruses, but I do understand how people can get so angry with Windows that they would be inspired to sabotage it. You should have heard my swearing sessions when I had to type a lab procedure into word, or compute means and standard deviations with excel. Plus, I never liked how Microsoft bullied and took over smaller companies to steal their good software ideas and make them under their own umbrella. Unfortunately, for a while, the only alternative was DOS or Linux Red Hat, both minimally graphical, and frankly difficult, with all the command prompts and the memorized obscure codes for doing things. But I like the idea of open source software, where people code together to make things better. I didn't see that it was a workable solution until the old laptop's Win98 OS expired (thank you Bill). Without the continued support of 98, there were still gaping holes in security and other software (like Adobe) that could not be upgraded. Rather than toss the laptop, I got enthused by ubuntu, a flavor of linux that is open source AND graphical, so I successfully installed Intrepid Ibex (8.04). And does work, but it really does take a looooooooong time to boot up and shut down, plus I shorted out my second battery, and the poor Dell may end up as a paperweight or landfill fodder soon. 8.04 is easy to use, reminds me of Win 98 which I was most comfortable with. The finding of drivers (so difficult with Microsoft) was immediate and intuitive with I.Ibex. The downside? Okay, this is really petty...I wanted to change the desktop background. Its really easy with Windows, but I can't figure out how to do it with linux. And I am tired of looking at the brown dirt painting, and the flat gray is not an option for me. See, even writing it, I can see that is such a lame reason not to like I.Ibex.

So back to the netbook: Dell laptop was having trouble getting power, battery was blown, so I started shopping on Ebay for an Asus. I figured I didn't need that much hard disk space, because I was NOT going to put all my music and photos on, I just needed a little pc for web-browsing, checking email, and writing documents. I found out that many Asus, especially the 700's and 900 series use a linux-based OS, so that didn't scare me. I found a netbook at a great price, got it home, plugged it in and quickly filled (overfilled) its 4GB of solid-state hard drive space. So much for being able to save a written document. Now, it had so little memory that I literally could not bookmark a website. Seriously!! Upon more investigation, I found out that this is a common problem with my model number (900a), and the best solution was to install ubuntu netbook remix. Why not upgrade the hard drive? Two big reasons: the first is that the solid state drive is soldered into the mini-PCMI card, so you have to swap out the whole card with a different card that has more SSD's soldered onto it. the second is that the bigger card costs as much as I spent on the netbook. However, I did not want to jump into UNR OS because I was having an easy time navigating the Xandros flavor of Linux that was pre-installed. I did a system recovery and found that the space required by this Xandros OX was 3.6 Gigs of my 4. In addition, there was an update that was forced to run, reducing my memory space to a mere 0.13 Gigabytes. On top of that there were 29 other updates, some of which were not meant for my model number, and others of which took up the remaining space. What about deleting things I didn't need? The Xandros OS made it impossible. You could delete it, but you didn't get your disk space back. The only way to get more disk space was by using a lot of code on a blogger's post to shrink the read-only partition and grow the usable partition. Too much for me. So I went with UNR and it seems to be working really well. I got the newest version of ubuntu which is the Jovial Jackelope (9.0), and I like the desktop a whole lot better. Plus it has the tabs (large style icons) that I liked with the Xandros OS. And now, I have a whole gig to myself for saving stuff, even after the updates. Presumably, I can also delete old documents and recover disk space if I need to.

Lastly, with all the researching into shrinking and growing partitions, I was able to resurrect, and make even more usable the old Dell laptop, so now I have Edubuntu for Brianna on it, again cool desktop background, and sufficient space. Still really slow booting up, though; the netbook boots up much more quickly, so it really is ideal for travel.