Well I’ve had an EEE PC for about a month now, and were I to be given the choice of a “do-over”, I would politely decline.

Firstly let me start by saying that no, perhaps the EEE PC isn’t for you. First glances of the unit could put a little dent in the pockets of “impulse buyers”, however you wouldn’t be disappointed. The EEE PC as I’m sure you already know is tiny, not much larger than a reasonable sized novel (few hundred pages). This is one of its many features that helps it sell, along with its price. Granted the notebook isn’t as cheap as originally planned, but is still a fair bit cheaper than the next most competitive ultra mobile notebook. Hopefully reading this article you will leave with some knowledge of the product, and if you are in the market of laptop shopping hopefully I made your decision a slight bit easier.

Bigger isn’t always better. I myself have never purchased, or owned a laptop, notebook, mobile pc, thin pc, smart phone, or what have you. Then you might think to yourself “What does this guy know about technology if he is just dipping his toes in the pool for the first time?”. And I could agree with you, perhaps I know nothing. However just because I’ve never owned any of these fancy gadgets doesn’t mean I’ve never been exposed. I could go on proving that I’m not totally incompetent, but that’s another post ;). Back on topic, the size of this laptop is one of its many great features. I currently own a reasonably powerful desktop, was on the bleeding edge of technology about a year ago, but as we all know the second a box is opened the price decreases. So having a currently modern PC, I didn’t see the need to get one of the many $499+ laptops from dell, or futureshop. These laptops are in the same price bracket as an EEE PC and have more RAM, storage, larger screen, more ports external ports, optical drive, need I go on? So if you are looking for a laptop, with these features, then stop reading here. If you are unsure then continue please. As I was saying, my desktop PC basically satisfies everything I need in a PC at home. So why get a laptop that can do everything, that I can already do, weighs 6+ pounds, has a larger than necessary screen (increasing the footprint), and components that I may never use because my desktop already performs these operations perfectly fine. So let me simplify what criteria I was looking for:

1. Low price ( less than $500 after taxes preferably )
2. Build Quality. I know after that first point, I can’t expect much can I?
3. A small footprint, and aesthetics. ( ultra mobile PC )
4. Reasonably large screen.
5. Ability to change the operating system ( not limited to a proprietary in house OS, I want freedom, or at least the knowledge that I can have freedom )
6. Has a built-in microphone. A web cam is nice but less important to me.
7. Can surf the web, word process, power point, excel, graph, edit graphics, view pictures, basically all the moderatly simple tasks a computer can do with integrated video
8. Media viewing/listening capabilities. Even though the majority of music and video playback will be done on my desktop, I would like the ability to play videos (divx, even mkv if the time should arise) and listen to music.
9. USB ports (5 in one media reader is a bonus). Most peripherals use USB which makes it essential to have lots of ports.
10. Wireless internet. This is one of the higher priority needs, as it is what connects everybody in the world. Wired internet of course is a bonus when wireless isn’t available.
11. How could I have forgotten battery? Being a mobile device, longer battery life is a bonus.
12. Light weight. Just that simple.

Rather than bore you with all the details of laptop shopping, I’ll just provide you with the EEE PC and how it measures up to my expectations.

1. Mind you the EEE PC isn’t as cheap as initially intended, and because of this it is in the same price bracket as other low end laptops. This makes the decision a bit harder (if it were actually $199 as originally intended, everybody would want one). But $399 for the 4G is reasonable, and if you can live without a webcam, drop $50 off that price for a very reasonable $439.
2. Portability is a super bonus. A good friend of mine bought a Dell XPS M1330 and I’ll admit, it is almost everything I would like in a laptop, except price. The laptop isn’t as portable of course but does have a fairly small footprint as well as asthetically pleasing on the eye. However the price definantly wasn’t right and thus automatically took it out of the running. Back to the EEE PC. ASUS has had alot of experience with laptop design, so its not much surprise that they did this one right. Quite simply, it is perfectly small, but not too small.
3. One would think, quality is reduced with price. Surprisingly with the EEE PC it actually feels like a solid unit. I’ve picked up cheaper older laptops, and when you pick them up, you can feel the plastic parts rubbing against each other creating vibrations. When I pick it up with one hand by a corner, there are no noises of rubbing plastic which just gives you that sensation of “awesome”.
4. The screen for the EEE PC is 7 inches. It’s not huge, but not tiny. I mean if there was one thing I would have to change, would be a larger screen, but all of the other pros outweigh this cons. The max resolution for this screen type is 800×480. Most programs show perfectly fine, some configuration windows are larger than the screen but nothing that a little ‘alt + left click + drag’ doesn’t fix. I’d say about 50% of the webpages I view were designed for 800×600, and so they fit in the browser perfectly fine, however the pages that are larger, I find aren’t a nuisance because lets be honest, content is top to bottom, not left to right. So when reading multi paged articles the content always fits within the center column, while the navigation is off to the side, not bothering anybody.
5. By default the laptop comes with a flavour of linux called Xandros. They say it can run WinXP and future releases will have WinXP with it, but for now its linux. If you decide you can’t live without WinXP then head on over to www.eeeuser.com which has an overwhelming amount of information for just about anything you want to do to the eeepc.
6. When not at my desktop pc, the ability to use skype is still very important, and carryign around a microphone would be a hassle. So having a built in microphone is great. If you use a webcam, then get 4G, otherwise save yourself 50 bucks and get the 4G Surf.
7. I briefly already talked about programs in screen size however to reiterate, yes the EEE PC runs just about every type of average daily software you throw at it. Mind you, don’t expect to be designing in 3DSmax or Maya and rendering motion with large polygon count, because that’s just not what this laptop was designed for.
8. Media viewing is a very nice feature. The laptop has no problem viewing divx videos fro either the solid state disk or a usb flash drive. However initially when streaming a file off my NAS (over wireless), I found that it would be slightly choppy, and after every 6-7 minutes the sounds would be out of sync, nothing a quick pause and restart wouldn’t fix. The wireless signal was 100% so that wasn’t the issue. But this was still unacceptable. After a but if forum browsing over at eeeuser one person seemed to have found the issue. It is with the default media player Mplayer. In the options it has a setting for how much memory to use for cache. I remember the default being 2048 kilobytes, and I bumped that up to an 8192 kilobytes which fixed the problem instantly. That being said y ideal setup uses vlc as the media player. Honestly, I haven’t found a need to use it for music. Not that I don’t plan to I just haven’t. I have played a single mp3 just to see if it works, and of course it does, but anything further than that, and you will have to check a review elsewhere. On a side note the Speakers to either side of the monitor are reasonably loud in ambient room noise. However if you were out standing at a bus stop, where traffic dB is much louder, you would have to use headphones to hear anything.
9. One important feature is USB ports. The EEE PC specifically has 3, which isn’t a lot, but isn’t few. I haven’t found myself wishing I had more, but that could be due to the fact that the most I plug into it is a mouse, and flash drive. Both were detected automatically by Xandros, which is convenient (no driver/linux compatibility hunting). The ports are all USB 2.0 of course.
10. Another big point was wireless internet. What good would this laptop be if it had no wireless internet? No good. But luckily it does, and its an 802.11g, backwards compatible with b in case your ever at an older internet cafe which hasn’t updated their wifi. I was initially worried when entering my WPA key into the dialog box here because the dropdown has 2 selections, WEP and WPA. I’m using WPA2 here at home and have had issues with certain wifi cards only working with WPA not WPA2. To my pleasant surprise it connect no problem. The wifi card is atheros, I could sit here and list hardware specs, but I’ll point you here for all the eee specs you could ever need. Signal strength seems to be excellent even if I’m far away, honestly I havn’t walked around testing signal strength, but I’ve read many forum posts and reviews which claim that the reception is exceptionally, better than average. But take that with a grain of salt if you so please.
11. This is the only other area, other than the screen size, that I’m slightly disappointed. All the advertisments and specs say that the EEE PC 4G with the 5200mAh battery lasts 3.5 hours. Let me say that this is completely inaccurate. Maybe it lasts 3.5 hours with the screensaver on, and no applications open. I expected more from the battery and am disappointed. If your viewing media expect 2.5 hours max. Leaving the wifi on if your not using it also drains battery. Asus does plan to release an extra battery and other accessories. So far only pictures have been shown, but the battery looks larger which means it probably has more cells and thus longer battery power. However, the advertised battery duration simply isn’t true, so if your buying it for super long battery power, then this may be an even larger downside to the laptop for you, than it was for me.
12. For the price, 2 pounds is as light as it gets. Find a laptop with the same functionality that is 2 pounds, then please leave a comment telling me where you found that gem.

In conclusion, the eeepc isn’t for everybody. If you have a desktop that currently satisfies all your computing needs except the mobile factor, this is perhaps for you. If your looking for a small laptop, not something that takes up half the space in your back pack, perhaps it’s for you. If you don’t plan to play video games ( with exceptions for simple ones like solitare), then perhaps it’s for you. If you just want an internet browsing, small, light weight, notebook then perhaps it’s for you. I could go on with reasons for you to buy, or not buy this laptop, but I’ll let you digest my impressions and make a decision of your own. If you have any questions feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment.