EEE pc review - Part 1

Time is always a funny thing. It just goes and goes and goes. With all the work this semester between subbing, teaching, and working in the class, my time has been pretty short.

Through out most of the semester, I have been using the EEE pc by ASUS. Through my work on the Adventures in Classroom Tech website and dummy class, I have been able to get a feel for what this little machine can do. The screen takes a little bit to get used to with only 7 inches or so of viewable space. I have found that I get a feel for it pretty fast. The same goes with the keyboard size. However, I was the proud owner of a hand-me-down Phillips Velo 500, and a Dell Axim, so the keyboard feels like a extra handheld keyboard, with the same kind of "little click" response and common "fat-finger" key mashing problems. The Shift key on the right side is in a funny feeling place, squished in below the enter key. The space on the hard drive is okay, at about 4 GB with half of that used up by the rescue OS.

There are plenty of options for customization for the machine. I did a live CD run of eeeXbuntu which run well. I wanted to still play around the stock OS, so I didn't commit to the install. As for the options for the stock OS (Xandros), there are plenty and the forums have been a great resource to answer questions.

Through the forums, I was able to locate the information on how to install other programs that are distributed through the regular repositories. Audacity, VLC, and a few screen capture programs were located. As well as a few tweaks for not having the machine shutdown when the lid is closed and allowing the USB and SD cards have executable programs and letting the system automatically write to those drives and not only the main drive. That was a big help, as with recording, the raw sound files can get pretty big.

Recording was nice. I liked having this little machine and a little mic in my bag ready to go when I needed it. Being able to just grab it all when a teacher had a minute to talk was great. For editing and production, the EEE handled everything fine. While I wouldn't recommend recording your mix album with it, having Audacity in the machine did save a lot of the hassle of transporting the files over to another machine and doing the work there.

The WiFi works great. Once a signal is locked into, the signal is not dropped. Using the security passwords is not an issue either, once the profile is saved, connecting doesn't require entering in the hex-code again.