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My new toy, the Eee PC

About a week ago, I got my newest electronic toy, the Eee Pc. First thought after I opened the box: “Wow, this is small!” Second thought: “Wow, this thing is cool!”

Needless to say, I’ve been playing with this thing quite a bit since I received it. I bought the 4G Galaxy Black model from Amazon.com, along with a 4GB Class 6 (the fastest speed available) SDHC Card. I’ve been a happy Amazon customer as of late- I bought my awesome new Samsung LCD TV there as well, which came with free shipping and arrived in just over a week.

The keyboard is not large by any means, and the touchpad isn’t the greatest one I’ve ever used. However, you get used to it pretty quickly. It is good enough to post here as I am doing right now. But the huge advantage is this thing is small. You could carry this thing just about anywhere and it is only the size of a large (but thin) book. It even comes with a slick little carrying case. The AC adapter is more like a phone charger rather than the large brick you see with most laptops. The thing is also quiet due to the solid-state drive instead of a normal hard drive.

As I said above, I bought a 4GB card for use as extra storage space, but I really don’t plan on storing loads of stuff on this machine. It works great as a internet browsing machine, as you can use it just about anywhere. Loading up some music or a movie on the card would be a great idea though as it works great as a media player. The small screen is still plenty large for playing back movies full screen- it is comparable to a portable DVD player.

I’ve had zero issues so far with the battery life- I don’t know exactly how long it is supposed to last but I can’t see it being shorter than 3 hours under normal usage. The CPU is designed to scale down to 112.5MHz when it isn’t fully needed, which does a great deal to save power (wasn’t that the speed of my family’s first Pentium machine?). The lack of a spinning hard drive also helps a lot.

The biggest usability fix I’ve found so far is plugging a USB mouse in- this allows you to have one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard. Given the keyboard’s size, it is quite easy to touch-type with one hand.

I’ll be doing a follow-up post sometime about getting Arch onto the Eee, and how I have it all set up. It is running great now, with every piece of hardware working. There is a rather large community of Arch users that have an Eee, including another dev Daniel (ise). Several users put together some packages of modules and scripts for the Eee, and I tried to build on their knowledge to put a little repository. I was going to do that tonight, but realized it might get a bit lengthy. I have a nice TV to watch anyway.

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