I was just looking at a friend’s Asus EEEPC which are all the rage right now. Its very cute, and I was sorely tempted to buy one, its £229 for the 4GB SSD model. However, its just not quite convincing enough for me, yet. The 7″ display is too small, I like the SSD but again its too small and needs supplementing with a USB stick, the keyboard is small but I could get used to it. Its cheap …. did I mention that? but hey, I can buy a full laptop for another £70.
What does attract me is the almost fixed function of the device. ie its designed to do a few things, but do them well, or well enough, specifically low impact tasks like email, web browsing etc. I thought about its possibility as an eBook, but really I need 1024×768 to get A4 page fidelity enough to read (fit to page view).
So, whilst I like the EEEPC, I think I would actually spend a bit more on a real laptop and then downgrade that to the capability of the EEEPC. this would be mega performance in comparison although I guess the battery life would be less.
Maybe I could rip the hard disk out and configure a bootable USB stick to start from to save battery. Windows couldnt save much this way as its too chatty with the registry and is always doing something even when you aren’t.
So, I think I’ll try that first, I have the measure of the EEEPC so thats my target for a ‘utility’ laptop.
