Cooking With Linux

It took about a week to get here, but it finally arrived, my Asus Eee PC is here. First of all I had to curb my excitement as the batteries took some time to charge – up to two hours.

As soon as it was ready it booted up in no time. First task is to test the WIFI. I did not have any trouble with the WIFI getting on to a network at all -- even my own!

The keyboard is of course, different, but I did not expect it to be the same as the keyboard on my desktop. I had no trouble typing on it. Anyone who has used a folding keyboard from a Palm Pilot before will not find the transition difficult at all. The touch-pad is not the greatest but considering the small space that Asus had to work with I can't complain. I did buy a mouse for it, but I would advise a mouse for any laptop as it will extend the life of the built in mouse and touch-pad.

OpenOffice writer works great, and after setting the view to 125%, the entire page width fits on the screen. There is no compromise using OOwriter on this laptop and I was pleased at how fast it boots up.

I did not know what to expect with regards to Web browsing. I did hear reports of users having to scroll to the right a lot with the Eee PC. Firefox opens to the Google search page with no scrolling required, as did iGoogle and Gmail. Other sites, a different story, but I did not find it a problem and I would be hard pressed to call it a show stopper.

So why did I buy this? Well I have to admit to a wee bit of technolust. But avoiding technolust was the very reason I did not just go out and purchase one as soon as the Eee PC came out. After I had one in my hands for 3 minutes, I knew that I wanted one and that it would be useful.

I appreciate the freedom to go anyplace and type / surf away to my hearts' content. For example, the apartment building where I live has a quiet secluded courtyard. It is a great place to read and often I wished that I had a laptop to take some notes or jot down some thoughts, nothing profound mind you, just stuff like what I read and where I read it. Well the Eee PC is just what the doctor ordered.

I do read a lot of content on the internet, the size of the screen on the Eee PC is just perfect for that. Best of all, the Eee PC is so quiet! That is a joy!!!

Best of all is the small environmental footprint. It did not take too much material too manufacture this computer and it runs on a fraction of the power of any desktop. I do not know if I would quickly recover the cost of the Eee PC through a reduced electricity bill, but it is an added bonus.

The strength of the Eee PC is that it falls in between the PDA and the ultra high tech cell phone. It is more than a toy, and it will attract a lot of interest from people in many occupations.

Who? Well, the person who has minimal Internet needs may find the Eee PC very useful. This person can go to a nearby WIFI hot spot, spend less than twenty minutes surfing and collecting e-mail; then be done with the computer for the rest of the day. Yes dear reader, there are people out there who are like that. This person may not require an ISP service at home, and a good return on investment in the Eee PC could come soon.

People living in a rural area, just outside of a small city, can be located in what I call the Internet third world. No high speed Internet and Dial-up is horrendous. In this case, it could make more sense to go to a WIFI hot spot while they are in town, to send and retrieve e-mail.

OK, I do have to fess up, 99% of this blog entry was done on the Eee PC. Final editing was done on my desktop.

There is a temptation to tinker with the Asus Eee PC. But for now I am very happy with the way it is as it came out of the box. And for me, that is amazing in itself.