I’ve now been using my Asus Eee PC as my principle desktop for three or four weeks - time for the novelty value of this cute little machine to wear off. What’s the verdict?

• Booting up in seconds is great
• I’ve got used to the Xandros simplified interface - it makes sense, although I do miss having multiple desktops
• The keyboard is small, but quite usable
• The screen is small, but the quality helps compensate for the small size. It is annoying when things just won’t fit on the screen - Thunderbird is an offender here, with many oversized dialog boxes for operations as simple as adding users to the address book. Poor UI design. OK, you can<Alt> drag to move things, but that’s annoying
• Some apps with cluttered interfaces are unusable on the small screen - Inkscape, for example

I’ve got rid of the factory-installed unionfs file system. I now keep a 4Gb SD card permanently in the eee. It’s encrypted with Truecrypt, and it holds my $HOME drive. I use Unison to keep this mirrored to my home server. I’ve also swapped the 512Mb memory for a 1Gb module. I can’t really say I’ve noticed any performance increase, but I couldn’t get used to the idea of not having a /swap file

Is this the perfect PC? I think it’s a big improvement on the conventional desktop. Even if you’re largely desk based, it’s a matter of a few seconds to plug in a USB keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and you have a desktop PC. Why have a big clunky box? When you need to be mobile, unplug the peripherals and take your PC with you.

For me, that’s the best of both worlds.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.