My New Electronic Toy Companion

What can I say? I’ve been looking at this ultra portable for a while now and finally decided to bite the bullet since there was a great rebate and mainly because I’ll be starting to teach in a few months and need something I can take with me and not have to worry about. So placed the order from Amazon on Sunday and via UPS today, this arrived!

Shipped on Monday, here by Wednesday morning. Boy UPS is getting fast to Hawaii! Used to take at least three days using second day air.

So what is so great about this thing? Well I’m actually not really sure yet other than it is really small and there seems to be a very passionate and large group of users out there for this machine. One of the places where I did a lot of my research was at www.EEEUser.com. They have some great members there and more information than anyone could care to find.

The Asus I bought is the Asus EEE PC900 20GB Linux version. It has a 8.9″ screen and weighs just a little under 2lbs according to the specs. The neat thing about it is it is all solid state (do people still use that term?) and so the 20GB “hard drive” is not really a hard drive at all and is more like a memory card built into the computer with the OS loaded on it. As mentioned I purchased the Linux version and partially it was because it came with a bigger drive, but the other thing was that I wanted to see if I could actually have a usable device for which there would be no software purchases necessary to do the typical office and web surfing type stuff and this fit the bill perfectly.

In any case, I’ve had it out of the box for about 8 hours now. Not all of it was spent playing around with it as I did have a lot of work that I needed to do today, but as I needed a little distraction I did manage to start it up and see what it could do. And so far I’m pretty impressed with how well it works. The Linux part is going to be the biggest challenge for me I think as it has been a while since I’ve worked with a command line type of system and although there is a lot you can do without typing Linux commands, there is also a lot that seems to involve doing just that so it will be a learning experience. Especially since the keyboard is a little smaller than I imagined, but I can’t really complain as I expected it to be small since a lot of people mention that when they first purchase the machine.

Have a lot more to do before I think I’ll really be ready to say if it was a smart purchase or not, but the first impressions are it will definitely be workable and will be yet another learning experience for me and that already makes it worthwhile.

Onward!